10/16/2026
Today's A Mighty Girl Community Pick: "All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today" by Dr. Elizabeth Comen. For nearly two thousand years, when a woman walked into a doctor's office with a complaint the doctor could not explain, she was likely to be told the same thing: it was all in her head. Her chest pain was anxiety, not the beginnings of a heart attack her doctor had never been trained to recognize in a female patient. Her paralyzing menstrual cramps were normal, not endometriosis, and she was being dramatic.
Her exhaustion was a nervous condition, best cured by a few weeks of enforced bed rest and silence. Her uterus, according to physicians as recent as the nineteenth century, might have wandered up into her chest and lodged there, a diagnosis called "hysteria" that has been used to dismiss women's real illnesses for more than two thousand years. In this bracing history of women and medicine, Memorial Sloan Kettering breast oncologist Dr. Elizabeth Comen walks readers through the eleven systems of the human body one by one and shows how each has been shaped, in ways still felt in every exam room today, by centuries of physicians assuming that the "default patient" is a man.
In "All in Her Head," Comen -- who trained at Harvard and Memorial Sloan Kettering, and spends her days in the exam room with women whose cancers have too often been diagnosed later than they should have been -- braids together case histories from her own practice, the writings of ancient and Enlightenment physicians, and the stories of the girls and women whose pain was named as hysteria, weakness, or imagination for as long as anyone was keeping records. What emerges is a portrait of a medical system that is finally beginning to ask better questions, and a plainspoken invitation for every woman who has ever been told her symptoms were "all in her head" to keep asking her own. Highly recommended for adult readers.
"All In Her Head" is available at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780063293014 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4lKkRoO (Amazon)
For Elinor Cleghorn's history of two thousand years of medical dismissal of women's pain, from ancient theories of "wandering wombs" to modern misdiagnoses of endometriosis and autoimmune disease, we recommend "Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780593182970 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4g3sgyQ (Amazon)
For a groundbreaking look at how a world built on male-default data -- from urban planning to medicine to car safety -- systematically disadvantages women, we highly recommend "Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men" for ages 14 and up at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781419735219 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/45wXzMu (Amazon)
