To conceive of another person’s pain is to undertake an obscure endeavor, one that’s often muddled by vexation, strained analogies and, at the crux of it all, doubt. We test the limits of empathy, questioning whether we can grasp another person’s reality—we probably can’t—and whether the sufferer has accurately deciphered the ebbs and flows of their body. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry parses this disconnect: “To have pain is to have certainty,” she writes, “to hear about pain is to have doubt.” But doubt, and the murky dialogue that surrounds it, is typically a best-case scenario, particularly if the sufferer is in possession of a uterus.

ASK ME ABOUT MY UTERUS: A QUEST TO MAKE DOCTORS BELIEVE IN WOMEN’S PAIN by Abby Norman Nation Books, 288 pp., $27.00

Too often, a woman’s pain is not merely met with doubt, but suspicion, both within the medical community and outside of it. Author and activist Abby Norman, has put decades of labor—including careful, independent medical study—into studying this phenomenon, as she describes in her book Ask Me About My Uterus, both a memoir and a trenchant manifesto. Born to a mother who suffered from severely disordered eating, Norman procured legal emancipation from her parents at the age of sixteen, after a childhood marred by neglect and severe hunger. Chronicling her agonizing efforts to be treated for endometriosis, Norman presents the harrowing realities of her youth and young adulthood—years punctuated by debilitating physical ailments, invasive medical testing, and bludgeoning surgeries that, for all manner of reasons, rarely brought relief, let alone cures—and describes how she became her own advocate within a system not disposed to take her seriously.

The story she tells is strikingly and distressingly Victorian—a parallel she emphasizes by interweaving her memoir with accounts of late nineteenth-century hysteria cases, including Sigmund Freud’s famous patient “Annie O.” Like Freud’s so-called hysterics, who were diminished as “nervous” or excessively emotional, Norman found that her attempts at seeking medical care were frequently derailed by accusations that whatever she felt—thumping abdominal pain, limb numbness—was imagined, perhaps the result of her precocity or “over-active” mind. “You’re clearly very intelligent. Very clever,” sneered one particularly condescending (male) doctor whom Norman confronted.

The implication was that Norman—along with all women, transgender people and non-binary persons—could not be trusted to accurately, or honestly, articulate physical distress. The distrust, however, runs deeper. For centuries, wild theories about female anatomy have simmered: Norman describes, for instance, the seventeenth-century theory that the uterus—long believed to be the root of every female malady—bounced around the body like a rubber ball, wreaking havoc wherever it settled. In fact, the “wandering womb” theory can be traced back to medical practice in Ancient Greece, where physicians contemplated the most effective strategies for luring the organ to its rightful place, like a feral dog.

Aretaeus of Cappadocia claimed that the womb “delights in fragrant smells” and “has an aversion to foetid smells, and flees from them.” To entice a roaming womb, doctors reasoned, simply besmear the vagina with aromatic scents, or repel it from the upper body by forcing the patient to nose something stinky. Oftentimes these anatomical hypotheses were shaped by misogyny and its accommodating assumptions about female inferiority. In Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Thomas Laqueur explains that, for thousands of years, the vagina was conceived “as an interior penis, the labia as foreskin, the uterus as scrotum, and the ovaries as testicles.” As late as the nineteenth century, echoes of this fictitious schematic—long since abandoned by medical practitioners—resonated in the cultural consciousness. “Women are but men turned inside out,” proclaimed Comte George Louis Leclerc de Buffon in 1807.