Prescribed Norms

Prescribed Norms is an impressively wide-ranging and witty study of over 200 years of women's health care and women's roles as doctors and nurses in Canada and the United States. As a contextual bonus, other parts of the world are added to the mix. Based on an exhaustive examination of the secondary literature, Cheryl Warsh presents readers with the complex reactions to and perceptions of women's bodies-awe and disgust, power and fragility-that dominate our past and present. Underlying her study is the challenge to 'embrace the chaos' of our bodily being and the need for medicine to do so as well. -- Wendy Mitchinson, University of Waterloo Bodies are a source of anxiety, pleasure, and pain. Prescribed Norms tells us just what this has meant for North American women over the past 200 years. No one but Cheryl Krasnick Warsh could be so compelling in explaining why girls and women of every age and in every community in Canada and the United States should have the power to control their own bodies. We owe her a debt of thanks. -- Veronica Strong-Boag, University of British Columbia

Challenging readers to rethink the norms of women's health and treatment, Prescribed Norms concludes with a gesture to chaos theory as a way of critiquing and breaking out of prescribed physiological and social understandings of women's health.

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.