Prescribed Norms : : Women and Health in Canada and the United States since 1800 / / Cheryl Krasnick Warsh.

• VerfasserIn: Warsh, Cheryl Krasnick,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2019]; ©2010
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

In her meticulously researched history, Cheryl Krasnick Warsh challenges readers to rethink the norms of women's health and treatment in Canada and the United States since 1800. Prescribed Norms details a disturbing socio-medical history that limits and discounts women's own knowledge of their bodies and their health. By comparing ritual practices of various cultures, Prescribed Norms demonstrates how looking at women's health through a masculine lens has distorted current medical understandings of menstruation, menopause, and childbirth, and has often led to faulty medical conclusions. Warsh also illuminates how the shift from informal to more formal, institutionalized treatment impacts both women's health care and women's roles as health practitioners. Always accessible and occasionally irreverent, Warsh's narrative provides readers with multiple foundations for reconsidering women's health and women's health care.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Part I: Rituals -- Chapter One: Wendy's Last Night in the Nursery: The "Disease" of Menstruation and Its Treatment -- Chapter Two: Gladys, Take Your Medicine! The Culture and Business of Menopause -- Part II: Technologies -- Chapter Three: Traditional Childbirth: Mothers and Babies -- Chapter Four: Modern Childbirth: Mothers and Doctors -- Chapter Five: Future Childbirth: Doctors and Babies -- Part III: Professions -- Chapter Six: Networks of Support, Networks of Opposition: The Medical Education of Women -- Chapter Seven: Nursing: The Science of Womanly Arts -- Epilogue: The Case for Chaos -- References -- Index