Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women's Pain by Abby Norman

The budding of feminist activism in recent decades has accelerated the rise in literature that tackles the topic of the female experience. Illness memoirs written about, by and for women are a growing genre, and Abby Norman’s 2018 book Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain makes a powerful contribution to the field. Telling a personal story about battling not only an illness but the entire medical system, Norman explores topics relevant for all, but especially for those who are ill.

The book is a brilliant blend of memoir and theoretical text, telling a compelling story of an unorthodox childhood and a life suddenly disrupted by a debilitating pain nobody believed was real. The story follows Norman growing up neglected by an anorexic and bulimic mother, absent father and abusive grandmother. As a teenage girl she becomes emancipated and aims to reinvent herself as a professional dancer while attending Sarah Lawrence College. Her ambitions are thwarted by episodic pain that becomes a permanent ailment controlling her life. There is a futile surgery and an endless string of hospital visits, during which she faces skepticism, doubt and dismissal by the medical staff, only to finally be diagnosed with endometriosis. Norman’s quest for answers leads her down an unlikely path of working in the healthcare system and eventually becoming a science writer and advocate for women with endometriosis.

Endometriosis, often regarded as an illness of the uterus due to the synchronization of the symptoms with the menstrual cycle, is one modern medicine has been aware of for centuries. Even so, there is still no clear cause for the illness, what influences its development or how to cure it, due to lack of research and the scarcity of information on the subject. What we do know is that the condition is estimated to affect one in ten women and can take up to ten years to diagnose. The main reason for the detrimentally slow diagnosis: Women seeking help aren’t believed to be experiencing the ailments afflicting them. The first assumption is that the patient is having psychological issues reflecting her inability to cope with the natural pain of menstruation. It is baffling that an issue as common as endometriosis is greeted with so much skepticism and appears to be of little to no interest to medical scientists.

Abby Norman. Discover more about this writer’s work here

Abby Norman asks the question “Why is this so?” She’s not alone in wondering, but what sets her apart is her creative way of illustrating the issue in an engaging, easily understandable text. Norman opens up many chapters with a comprehensive overview of particular medical cases or bigger medical studies dating back to the 19th century, effectively illustrating the history of the female patient. From illness explained as hysteria to the exclusion of women from medical trials and drug testing, the narrative illustrates that medicine is not only sexist but also how that sexism is often lethal for the female patient. Norman flawlessly transitions from factual to creative writing, using personal reflections and commentary as ways to segue into telling her own story.

Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain is a memoir that educates as much as it entertains. The riveting stories of the author’s unusual life are cunning bridges between important analyses of the complex relationship between Western medicine and female patients. An interesting read for anyone wanting to be challenged by literature, the memoir offers significant relevance for women suffering from illnesses of reproductive organs. Its involving prose offers comfort as well as specific information empowering women to find their voices, take control of their illness and demand medical justice. —Alekszandra Rokvity

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Alekszandra Rokvity

Alekszandra Rokvity is a PhD candidate working in medical humanities and cultural studies between the Karl Franzens University of Graz, Austria and the University of Alberta in Canada. Her academic interest lies in the experiences of women with endometriosis within the healthcare system. “It gives me no pleasure to confirm that my academic research has only proven what I've personally experienced and intuitively known: that there is relentless, systematic sexism present at the heart of Western medical practices which not only reflects the position of women in society at large, but seriously affects the care ill women are provided.”

Art & Anatomy: Drawings by Laura Ferguson & Katie Grogan, Editors

Imagine a medical student lingering outside the door of the anatomy lab, half eager to enter and yet half afraid. When she opens the door, the student will enter a place Danielle Ofri, MD, calls "Stuffy, smelly, drippy, disgusting" in her introduction to this beautifully conceived and presented volume entitled Art & Anatomy: Drawings by editors Laura Ferguson and Katie Grogan, published in 2017 by the University of California Medical Humanities Press.The student might wonder how she will ever survive learning to dissect the human body; how learn to balance the clinical and the humane; how to embrace the technical necessities while maintaining the creative passion that called her to medicine in the first place.

Laura Ferguson, Artist in Residence at New York University's School of Medicine's Master Scholars Program. Photo by Emon Hassan

Since 2009, Laura Ferguson, Artist in Residence at New York University's School of Medicine's Master Scholars Program, has been providing an answer to these questions, for medical students as well as for residents, physicians, nurses, and other medical personnel. On Tuesday evenings, Ferguson transforms the anatomy lab into an artist's studio, where she guides and encourages students as they study, and then draw, the beautiful bits and pieces of the human body.

The purpose of her Art & Anatomy seminar, Ferguson writes, is not for students to create perfect art but rather "to experiment, to take risks" (page 134). Here there is no right or wrong, only the opportunity to look deeply and experience the human body artistically.

The drawings in this book are intimate, sensual, and astoundingly gorgeous, presented in an order that reflects the eight sessions of the course. In session one, students each select a bone from the "bone box." Ferguson names the bones, shows where they articulate in the human skeleton, then invites students to study and draw their chosen bones, the whorls and dips. As they draw―vertebrae and spinal column, the drama of sacrum and pelvis, ribs, femur, the tiny bones of the foot―students learn forms that fascinate rather than facts to memorize.

Editor Katie Grogan. Photo by Jeff Weiner

Ferguson also asks students to draw the bones of their own hands, to imagine bone linked to muscle and tendon, and perhaps to ponder how their anatomy is like or unlike that of their patients. Hannah Bernstein, on page 60, draws her left hand from without and within, including a scar that ladders down from the base of her thumb. Amy Ou draws her hand holding the hand bones of a skeleton (page 67), surely a way to connect her own living flesh with the reality of patient mortality she will encounter during her medical practice.

Storytelling is encouraged. Jing Ye draws the pelvis with a fibula and radius intersecting, naming this "The Fiddler" (page 43). Shian Liu, titles the ribcage, drawn in strong strokes, "Ribcage, of Breath and Bone" (page 35). Karen Ong draws a cadaver in its protective bag, naming it, "Under My Skin" (page 106). Such storytelling encourages students to visualize the lives of their patients and to examine their own emotional responses to these imagined lives.

In another session, students draw from life models, a chance to see the body both in motion and repose and so picture the movement of bone and muscle under skin. Students also draw from cadavers, an artistic and emotional challenge. Encouraged to observe in groups, students focus on details―not an easy task when faced with the lovely complexities of the opened body. In later sessions, students become even more intimately involved with the cadavers, removing individual organs to visualize their precise locations in the body and to observe the natural variations in human anatomy. Studying the organs they removed, students discover beauty in kidney, lung, heart, or brain. Some choose to draw the faces of their cadavers. Yohei Rosen's becomes a study in the planes and angles of the face (page 108); Michael Malone's "Bisected Head" is titled "Abandon" (page 115).

In the final session, students put finishing touches on their drawings and select which to scan and save. Many of these drawings have found a home here, in this fascinating and moving book. As Ferguson's students surely must leave her Art & Anatomy drawing class changed and inspired, so too readers will be intrigued and humbled by these accomplished and deeply reverent drawings.—Cortney Davis

See a video about Laura Ferguson’s work on Narratively

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Cortney Davis

Cortney Davis, a Nurse Practitioner, is the author of Taking Care of Time, winner of the Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize (Michigan State University Press, 2018). Her other poetry collections include Leopold’s Maneuvers, winner of the Prairie Schooner Poetry Prize, and Details of Flesh (Calyx Books). Her non-fiction publications include When the Nurse Becomes a Patient: A Story in Words and Images and The Heart’s Truth: Essays on the Art of Nursing. Davis is co-editor of Learning To Heal: Reflections on Nursing School in Poetry and Prose (Kent State University Press 2018). She has received an NEA Poetry Fellowship, three CT Commission on the Arts Poetry Grants, and is an annotator for the NYU Literature and Medicine Database. “Entering the Sick Room” and “It Was The Second Patient of The Day” (Poetry) www.cortneydavis.com @nurseprofile