Bookworm: ‘All in Her Head’ won’t cure you, but it can’t hurt
‘The Fast’ might make you slow down and think
“All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early medicine Taught Us about Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today”
- By Elizabeth Comen, M.D.
- c. 2024, Harper Wave
- $32, 368 pages
Ugh, that hurts! It hurts there and over here, the tops of your feet and the side of your knee, behind your eyes and between your shoulder blades. Your heart pounds, your hands shake, and your stomach’s rolling like a dice cup. You can’t complain, though. As in the new book, “All in Her Head” by Elizabeth Comen, M.D., who’d listen?
The small skeleton, no bigger than that of a five-year-old, dangles by a wire in a museum in Philadelphia, the skull of an infant in its bony hand. The skeleton was once a living person, a dwarf who lived in New Orleans; the skull is that of her infant who died at birth, along with its mother. The large skeleton of the man standing next to them has had a name all along. Only recently did anyone bother to learn the name of the woman.
It was this way for centuries in the U.S.: when medical care was needed, women were ignored, denied, minimized, scoffed at, and physically injured. Most of the perpetrators were white men who willfully ignored their own observations, Comen says. They refused to heed what they saw or callously didn’t care, in favor of personal gain.
Take, for instance, plastic surgery. Its origins were on the battlefields of the Civil War, to help soldiers disfigured by bullets and cannon balls. Not long after the war, early medical specialists turned their eyes toward women, breast enhancement, and rhinoplasty.
Says Comen, “beauty ... was in the eye of the beholder – but now, the beholder was holding a scalpel.”
In the past, doctors weighed in about fashion, personal morality, what women ate, how they looked, and what they did for fun. The believed that exercise was bad, and they forced women (but never men) to prove their gender in competition. They treated women like men in cardiac issues; promoted cigarettes to women for weight loss; and one doctor, under the belief that they didn’t require it, did intimate surgery on enslaved women without anesthesia ...
Imagine for a minute that you were able to brush away all the cringe-worthiness that’s inside this book. Imagine that you looked past the purposeful cruelty and the laissez faire attitude towards women’s health. If you could do all that – big “if” – then “All in Her Head” would still outrage you.
You can attribute that to the way author Elizabeth Comen, M.D. makes this book completely relatable. She begins with a story that puts a reader in the shoes of several women who were victimized by the times in which they lived and the patriarchal medical establishments that often willingly failed them. Comen does it with sympathy and indignation mixed with a little shock; she adds personal observations, too, which soften the insults enough to keep you reading.
Science lovers and readers of true medical tales will enjoy this book, and don’t be surprised if it makes you keep a sharper eagle-eye on your medical care. “All in Her Head” won’t cure what ails you, but it can’t hurt.
“The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without”
- By John Oakes
- c. 2024, Avid Reader Press
- $30, 320 pages
You haven’t done dishes in days. The sink is full of dish, in fact. Dish, one cup, singular, because you haven’t cooked in days, either. You’re fasting and it was your choice. You have your reasons for denying your body food and in “The Fast” by John Oakes, you’ll see the history behind it.
Politically, globally, personally, any day may bring turmoil to your life. It did to John Oakes one spring and it made him grow contemplative. He’d fasted before, a few days, give or take, and he knew it “involves doing less, but... in a radical way.” He wanted to slow down and try fasting again, this time for a week.
He “proposed the fast to my spouse” who agreed to join him. They decided to consume only water, tea, coffee, and vegetable broth, and the fast began.
On Day One, hunger pains were tolerable but time stretched thin. Oakes decided to add silence to his fast, remembering a trip to Minneapolis, to the quietest place on Earth.
Day Two brought him more inside himself, as he thought about the many throughout history who’ve fasted for preparation, sacrifice, and spirituality. He was hungry, not uncomfortably so, but his sense of smell was elevated.
On Day Three, he missed eating as he thought about our bodies as “marvelous machines,” and what fasting does to us. By Day Four, “The cleansing process [was] well underway” with Ascetics, holy men and Biblical figures as his guides. He was steadfast on Day Five, as he thought about fasting as protest. Day Six brought a wish for his fast to end, and he examined how fraud has tainted fasting.
At midnight on Day Seven, the fast was over but it lingered in Oakes’ mind. There are people who take fasting to the extreme, he says, but we shouldn’t let a disease “keep us from exploring the gifts that fasting has to offer ... ”
Even without a pair of eyes there, your stomach always seems to know what time it is. It reminds you about lunch, sometimes loudly, but “The Fast” may surprise you with a desire to ignore the borborygmus, even for a day.
Before you skip a meal in favor of the book, though, just know that this isn’t a fluffy-as-a-pancake look at doing without. Author John Oakes goes deep in his examination of the practice of fasting, deep into religion and ancient history, deep into modern politics. Most of this book will remind you of meditating because it’s distinctly interesting, full of conviction, and it’s deliberate. You’ll almost want to take it to your yoga mat to read or find a chair in a quiet room that allows for pausing and pondering.
This book fairly demands that you do so, in fact – which also means that it’s not for everyone. It’s not Reading Lite; treat it as such and you may get lost. But if you want something that’s going to make you slow down and think, “The Fast” might just be your cup of tea.
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The Bookworm is Terri Schlichenmeyer. She has been reading since she was 3 years old and never goes anywhere without a book. Terri lives on a hill in Wisconsin with two dogs and 11,000 books. Read past columns at marconews.com.