All in Her Head

The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today

Elizabeth Comen

• Publisher: Harper Wave
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780063293014
• eBook ISBN: 9780063293021
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medicine Biographies

Finalist for the 2025 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

USA Today Bestseller

“All in Her Head accomplishes a remarkable feat of storytelling. By combining essential medical histories about women’s bodies with all the narrative propulsion of a medical thriller, Comen has written a must-read, compelling, and important book.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Song of the Cell

“Wow! This book will upend everything you thought you knew about your body while empowering you to make better decisions moving forward. Through storytelling, extensive research, and easy recommendations, Dr. Elizabeth Comen has given us all a priceless road map to reclaim our agency.”—Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play

A surprising, groundbreaking, and fiercely entertaining medical history that is both a collective narrative of women’s bodies and a call to action for a new conversation around women’s health.

For as long as medicine has been a practice, women's bodies have been treated like objects to be practiced on: examined and ignored, idealized and sexualized, shamed, subjugated, mutilated, and dismissed. The history of women’s healthcare is a story in which women themselves have too often been voiceless—a narrative instead written from the perspective of men who styled themselves as authorities on the female of the species, yet uninformed by women’s own voices, thoughts, fears, pain and experiences. The result is a cultural and societal leg­acy that continues to shape the (mis)treatment and care of women.

While the modern age has seen significant advancements in the medical field, the notion that female bodies are flawed inversions of the male ideal lingers on—as do the pervasive societal stigmas and lingering ignorance that shape women’s health and relationships with their own bodies.

Memorial Sloan Kettering oncologist and medical historian Dr. Elizabeth Comen draws back the curtain on the collective medical history of women to reintroduce us to our whole bodies—how they work, the actual doctors and patients whose perspectives and experiences laid the foundation for today’s medical thought, and the many oversights that still remain unaddressed. With a physician’s knowledge and empathy, Dr. Comen follows the road map of the eleven organ systems to share unique and untold stories, drawing upon medical texts and journals, interviews with expert physicians, as well as her own  experience treating thousands of women.

Empowering women to better understand ourselves and advocate for care that prioritizes healthy and joyful lives— for us and generations to come—All in Her Head is written with humor, wisdom, and deep scientific and cultural insight. Eye-opening, sometimes enraging, yet always captivating, this shared memoir of women’s medical history is an essential contribution to a holistic understanding and much-needed reclaiming of women’s history and bodies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Skin, Integumentary: It’s What’s Inside That Counts
• Chapter 2: Bones, Skeletal: Skulls and Whalebones
• Chapter 3: Muscle, Muscular: Who’s the Weakest of Them All?
• Chapter 4: Blood, Circulatory: Matters of the Heart
• Chapter 5: Breath, Respiratory: Perhaps Women Breathe Different Air
• Chapter 6: Guts, Digestive: The Price of Going (and Not Going) with Your Gut
• Chapter 7: Bladder, Urinary: A Thousand Years of Holding It In
• Chapter 8: Defense, Immune: Self-Sabotage
• Chapter 9: Nerves, Nervous: The “Bitches Be Crazy” School of Medicine
• Chapter 10: Hormones, Endocrine: The Hormone Hangover
• Chapter 11: Sex, Reproductive: The Mother of All Moral Panics
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher