Elizabeth Comen > Quotes

“Today, the practice of cosmetic medicine is one that walks the line between empowering women to control their bodies and trapping them in a gilded cage of punishing beauty standards.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“Women remain underrepresented and overlooked in medical research, even though many treatments interact differently in a female body than in a male one.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“Thousands of year ago, a Viking warrior was laid to rest in a grave adorned with a sword, an axe, a spear, armor piercing arrows, a battle knife, two shields, and two horses, all suggestive of a professional, high-ranking commander. When the grave was discovered in the late nineteenth century, experts agreed this must be the burial site of an esteemed MALE warrior. It wasn't until the 1970s that some scientists looked more closely at the remains and asked: Could these small, gracile bones be the remains of a woman?
The greater scientific community balked; the very idea of a female warrior was too ridiculous to entertain. And yet, fifty years later, a DNA analysis of the Viking skeleton by Stockholm Unversity osteologist Anna Kjellstrom conclusively proved it accurate. It only took so long, and required so much, because the bones told a different story than the medical institions and experts of the 1800s did. The skeleton was clearly female - but the men saw what they wished to see, what they'd been taught to see.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today

“Yet evidence shows that women also spend more time with patients, embrace more empathic roles, and connect with their patients better (resulting in better outcomes).”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“The mistake doctors made, and continue to make, is imagining that a disease that’s in the patient’s head must therefore, in some sense, be a fabrication over which the patient has control.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“In France in the 1860s, the proximity of the female heart to the female bosom made a physician named René Laennec so uncomfortable that he invented an early prototype for the stethoscope, just so he could avoid putting his ear to his female patients’ chests.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today

“A lot of our colleagues are almost afraid of taking care of pregnant women,” Bose says. “But when fear stops us from asking questions, it stops us from solving treatable problems.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“A delicate euphemistic vocabulary has sprung up alongside these new procedures: lifting, plumping, smoothing, filling. It all sounds so gentle, less like medicine, more like self-care. And yet we are still no closer to disentangling what women want for their faces and bodies from what doctors, or husbands, or social pressures might tell them they’re supposed to want.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“A man with high testosterone, it was understood, was virile, a warrior, a stud. A woman with too much estrogen, on the other hand, was just crazy.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today

“But here, there were obstacles: religious, cultural, and legal. In the United States, disseminating contraceptives—or even just information about how to use them—was banned by the government well into the 1960s. The National Institutes of Health refused to fund basic research in the reproductive sciences and was outright forbidden from funding birth control research until 1959.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“The role of women was proscribed in medicine as in society, bolstered by the stereotype of the female nurturer: Doctors cured. Nurses cared.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today

“Western medical storytelling has largely eschewed the discussion of women’s bodies, let alone elevated them as powerful, capable, or of equal worth to men’s. In the medical history that defines women’s “normal” bodily functions—as well as their pain, pleasure, strength, and intellectual capacity—the voices of women themselves are notably absent. This”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“but the greater difference comes in the form of active pushback, from within and often by female physicians, against the twin forces of objectification and paternalism that have dominated for too long in orthopedic medicine.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“Rather, it is to ask for a medical world that is more human, more holistic, more capable of seeing the patient as a whole person and not just a series of broken parts.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“By refusing to let it take her beauty, Amrita wasn’t just giving herself the gift of a more youthful appearance; she was reclaiming a sense of control over her life.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“And then she said it. Not her last words, but the ones I'll never forget.
"I'm so sorry for sweating on you.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today

“Today, we are burdened not only by the legacy of ignorance, indifference, oppression, and subjugation toward women’s medical issues but also an entire system built around it: electronic medical records, insurance bottlenecks, and specialization have fragmented our understanding and treatment of the body, with women impacted most. In too many fields, the pathologies specific to women remain underfunded, under-researched, and frequently misdiagnosed.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“Between the purported sex appeal of tuberculosis and its special deadliness in young people, being afflicted with the disease—or at least, looking like you were—became associated with a certain status. This was a moment at which a woman’s value was strongly tied to femininity, fragility, and purity alike. The consumptive girl lived at the tantalizing nexus of all three: being made at once sexually desirable by sickness yet also too sick to consummate that desire. And her death, heartbreaking as it was, only cemented her status as a sort of archetype of female purity, unsullied by the usual forces that conspired to slowly rob a woman of her value. It was possible, in this moment, to imagine that tuberculosis patients were destined for something greater, something more meaningful, than the ordinary vagaries of a mortal life: when the consumptive girl passed, it would be in a state of unpolluted grace”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today

“Beauty, as always, was in the eye of the beholder - but now, the beholder was holding a scalpel.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today

“One of the essential qualities of the clinician is his interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“the actual term “hysteria” first emerged in the works of Hippocrates in the fifth century BC, again describing a disease resulting from the movement of the uterus—which by now was imagined not only to merely shift its location but to wander the entirety of the body like a sort of insensible animal, sowing chaos wherever it went.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“but when it comes to women's health, medicine still struggles to weigh the costs and benefits of survival”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today

“He won’t do fat women, and does very few men,”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“The numbers have only increased as the procedures get better, and cheaper; the cosmetic surgeons whose practices once piggybacked off the facial reconstruction of mutilated soldiers have given way to medspas where licensed aestheticians dole out injectables to women on their lunch breaks. A delicate euphemistic vocabulary has sprung up alongside these new procedures: lifting, plumping, smoothing, filling. It all sounds so gentle, less like medicine, more like self-care. And yet we are still no closer to disentangling what women want for their faces and bodies from what doctors, or husbands, or social pressures might tell them they’re supposed to want.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“As a general rule, all women are hysterical. And every woman carries with her the seeds of hysteria. —Augustin Fabre, MD, 1883”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“I was a twenty-six-year-old intern when I met Paula in the ER as Elmhurst. I was the supervising resident's face darken with worry as he realized the urgency of the situation; I saw the anguish of the cardiology team as they arrived too late to save her from a death that could have, should have, been prevented. If only the triage nurse had realized that she had recently given birth; if only her obstetrician had recognized her symptoms during her pregnancy as the onset of cardiomyopathy; if only the medical community hadn't spent the better part of two centuries ignoring and dismissing female cardiac patients such that even in the year 2004 the manifestations of heart disease in women remained underresearched and misunderstood.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today

“Why is it that male physicians are more likely to interrupt their patients sooner than female physicians? Is it that women are expected to be better listeners, to interrupt less, to demonstrate emotion and empathy? What would happen if we built those expectations into every medical education, for every doctor, from the very beginning. What would medicine look like if all the female energy that was squeezed out and sidelined from it over the course of two millennia was allowed back in?”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today

“And then she said it. Not her last words, but the ones I'll never forget.
"I'm so sorry for sweating on you.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today

“And guinea pig testicles.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today – A Memorial Sloan Kettering MD's History of Healthcare and Agency

“The idea was just this: that there is something beautiful, and wonderfully feminine, and powerful and empowering at once, about a woman who can’t breathe.”
― Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today