Here at Natural Womanhood, we frequently discuss the unfortunate realities of women being ignored by their doctors, excluded from clinical trials, understudied in the majority of medical research, and how they’ve been underserved by gynecology’s birth control fixation.
Longtime readers may therefore know that the history of women’s health is rife with stories of women’s bodies being objectified, ignored, mutilated, and sexualized. In her popular 2024 book, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us about Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today, Dr. Elizabeth Comen, M.D., “exposes the shocking, infuriating, and heartbreaking medical myths and practices that have haunted the care and treatment of women for millennia,” (as one reviewer put it).
In this review, I’ll dive into the strengths and limitations of All in Her Head, and give my recommendation for whether you should buy, borrow, or skip it.
Elizabeth Comen, M.D. is a breast cancer oncologist in New York City. She graduated with her BA in the History of Science from Harvard College, and her MD from Harvard Medical School. Harvard offers a unique cross-disciplinary concentration which bridges the sciences, history, global health, and medicine, and Dr. Comen’s interdisciplinary background truly shines in All In Her Head.
After graduating from Harvard, Dr. Comen did her residency at the prestigious Mount Sinai Hospital, and completed an additional oncology fellowship at the equally renowned Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Dr. Comen has published in several prestigious scientific journals, received numerous grants and awards, and made appearances on several news and print outlets like The Today Show, Buenos días, América, Fox News, Elle Magazine, and El New York Times. She is a sought-after writer and speaker, and these particular talents shine in her book.
¿Cuál es el público destinatario de All In Her Head?
All in Her Head is written for anyone curious about the history of women in medicine. Physicians may find that the book adds helpful context to understanding and treating their female patients. Female patients may find it useful to understand the history of treatment for a particular disease. All readers can appreciate the picture painted by All in Her Head of just how far we’ve come in medical treatment and research in the 21st century.
¿Cuáles son las principales áreas de contenido de All In Her Head?
Dr. Comen organized her book in the same style as a physiology textbook: by dividing the body into eleven discrete organ systems that include Integumentary, Skeletal, Muscular, Circulatory, Respiratory, Digestive, Urinary, Immune, Nervous, Endocrine, and Reproductive (p. xv). Thus, her chapters are colloquially named Skin, Bones, Muscle, Blood, Breath, Guts, Bladder, Defense, Nerves, Hormones, and Sex, sandwiched by an introduction and conclusion.
Each chapter includes many (sometimes horrifying) stories of how women were treated by (almost always male) physicians throughout history. The examples come from real accounts written down by doctors describing cases with female patients, as well as one notable example of a medical textbook describing a fictional female patient. Each story illustrates some inaccuracy or bias shown towards a female patient, often to detrimental effect.
Puntos fuertes de All In Her Head
The book highlights and legitimizes women’s medical history
One of the book’s biggest strengths is that it takes something many women have felt (“I wasn’t taken seriously”) and places it within historical context. Dr. Comen convincingly shows that dismissal of women’s symptoms is not anecdotal bad luck; it is structural, historical, and deeply embedded in the development of modern medicine.
Dr. Comen convincingly shows that dismissal of women’s symptoms is not anecdotal bad luck; it is structural, historical, and deeply embedded in the development of modern medicine.
She highlights that “Western medical storytelling has largely eschewed the discussion of women’s bodies, let alone elevated them…” (p. xiii). Likewise, women’s problems have been dismissed for centuries, often chalked up to female ‘weakness’ or ‘frailty:’ “women’s bones revealed them to be primitive and frail, underdeveloped and inferior and… in need of watchful protection by male stewards” (p. 39).
En All in Her Head, Dr. Comen paints a convincing picture of how women, historically, have been told how they should look and feel by their husbands, fathers, male guardians, and physicians. This may ultimately encourage some modern women in how far we’ve come, while also legitimizing those women who sense that much of women’s health care is still woefully inadequate.
The book is readable and accessible
Dr. Comen writes for a broad audience, not a clinical one. The book is engaging, fast-moving, and intentionally narrative-driven, which makes dense medical history approachable for readers who might never pick up an academic book or text on gender bias in medicine.
In nearly every chapter, Dr. Comen uses examples of real women from historical medical texts, decoding the male bias that was implicit in the historical descriptions of various medical ailments or treatments. For example, in the chapter on blood, Dr. Comen discusses the prevalent diagnosis of ‘chlorosis,’ a contemporary term for iron deficiency anemia and its related ailments. It was often found in young, unmarried women, and many male physicians ascribed it to “heartbreak,” “ungratified sexual desire,” or “that female masturbation was the secret root cause” (p. 91). For example, Dr. Charles E. Simon wrote to the masses that the disease was due to sexual desires in The American Journal of Medical Sciences in 1897, but then forcefully concluded the disease was the “result of malnutrition” (p. 91).
In nearly every chapter, Dr. Comen uses examples of real women from historical medical texts, decoding the male bias that was implicit in the historical descriptions of various medical ailments or treatments.
Limitaciones o puntos ciegos
Chapters are repetitive
The book makes its central point early and convincingly: medicine has systematically failed women. However, rather than deepening the argument, each successive chapter reiterates the same pattern through different specialties and patient stories. I found the cumulative effect felt less like escalation and more like redundancy.
Dr. Comen touches on some of our favorite female health topics at Natural Womanhood, including women’s hormonas, menstruación, and sexual health. However, she presents what I felt was a predictable line that “despite the ubiquity of hormones…somehow only women have ever been saddled with the suggestion that their hormones make them unpredictable, incompetent, and unfit for certain types of work” (p. 257). Dr. Comen likewise beats the drum that “medicine’s early and ultimately misinformed theories of how hormones worked in women’s bodies…have been more damaging when it came to women’s equality” (ibid).
While there is certainly truth to both of these points, the continued reiteration of them feels repetitive. And while some readers may find it fascinating to read about how doctors damaged women’s bodies for eleven chapters, I admittedly found it tedious.
The tone is prosecutorial
The book is strongest when exposing harm; it is weaker when parsing nuance. Its tone is intentionally sharp, but at times, I felt that her anger flattened the true complexity of the subject. Not every failure in women’s medicine is reducible to misogyny alone. Some also reflect broader problems in modern medicine: fragmented care, underfunded research, time-poor clinicians, and profit-driven systems. These have been prevalent in medicine for centuries. Dr. Comen gestures at these issues, but the book is more interested in indictment than systems analysis.
Not every failure in women’s medicine is reducible to misogyny alone. Some also reflect broader problems in modern medicine: fragmented care, underfunded research, time-poor clinicians, and profit-driven systems.
That said, I was pleasantly surprised by Dr. Comen’s treatment of control de natalidad. While she introduced the topic with criticism of the National Institutes of Health for refusing to fund basic research in the reproductive sciences through 1959 (p. 267), she accurately acknowledged that the early (male) developers of hormonal birth control succeeded in “flooding the bodies of… patients with powerful hormones that fundamentally altered their biological processes” (p. 268). Furthermore, she calls out that Dr. Gregory Pincus (one of the co-developers of the first oral contraceptive pill) was not troubled “by the possibility that his groundbreaking research was coming at the expense of his subjects’ health and happiness” (p. 269), a topic with which Natural Womanhood readers are well familiar.
The book lacks concrete solutions
This is probably the book’s biggest substantive limitation. All in Her Head certainly succeeds as an “anger with receipts” book, in that Dr. Comen is excellent at showing readers what is broken. However, she is less concrete about what repair should look like. Yes, she makes the broad call to listen to women more seriously, study women more rigorously, and value care differently. Those are important points, but readers looking for policy, clinical reform, or even just a few practical next steps may find the ending less satisfying than the setup.
El veredicto: comprar, pedir prestado o saltárselo All In Her Head ¿Todos juntos?
Personally, I would recommend Natural Womanhood readers borrow (or perhaps even skip) All In Her Head. While the overall topic is fascinating, and I appreciate that women are finally being accepted and appreciated in medical practice (with room to improve), I found the author’s repetitive stories and angry tone to be tedious, alarming, and disconcerting. When we consider women’s history, it is unfortunately not surprising that female patients have been subjected to sexism, malpractice, and outright abuse over time. However, I personally found it unnecessary to harp on the evils of male physicians for eleven chapters, especially without including more nuance around our broader healthcare system’s failures.
That being said, I do appreciate these facts coming to light. It es important to acknowledge where medical practice and history have mistreated women, and in some areas caused harm by the medical treatment (or lack thereof) that was prescribed. For the modern woman who suspects she’s being seriously gaslighted or outright misled by her healthcare professional (male or female!), this book might provide the gut-check needed to advocate for herself and seek better care.
En última instancia, All in Her Head might be an interesting read for someone deeply interested in women’s history or medical history, and it might be especially important for current or aspiring physicians to acknowledge the limitations of medical research for women’s health. The average NW reader—who may already be familiar with the historic underrepresentation of women in medical research—could simply borrow this book and peruse the chapters that might be most interesting or relevant to her.
