My library finally got Not Tonight for me yesterday. 15 pages in and have 5 post-its sticking out of the pages already! I’ve been making notes in pencil since it’s a library book – I think I’m going to have to do a lot of erasing before I turn it back in!!!
What’s this book about?
How do our entrenched ideas about mind, body, gender, and legitimacy shape what we believe about migraine?
[I]f biomedicine has discovered that migraine is “real,” why does it remain so easy to ignore, dismiss, and delegitimate? Has the “discovery” of the brain in migraine really erased the idea of the hysterical patient that is so deeply embedded in doctor-patient interactions about pain? In this book, I argue that the recent biomedicalization of migraine is not powerful enough to erase centuries of sexism in culture and in medicine. If anything, the transformation of migraine from a disorder of the mind to a disease of the brain has reified some of the same stultified ideas about gender that always made life difficult for both men and women in pain. The result has important implications for how we understand whose pain and suffering is taken seriously and whose is ignored on an individual level, at the clinic, in the annals of medical journals, and by policy makers.