All in Her Head

The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today

By: Elizabeth Comen

Narrated by: Anna Caputo

Finalist for the 2025 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

USA Today Bestseller

“All in Her Head accomplishes a remarkable feat of storytelling. By combining essential medical histories about women’s bodies with all the narrative propulsion of a medical thriller, Comen has written a must-read, compelling, and important book.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Song of the Cell

“Wow! This book will upend everything you thought you knew about your body while empowering you to make better decisions moving forward. Through storytelling, extensive research, and easy recommendations, Dr. Elizabeth Comen has given us all a priceless road map to reclaim our agency.”—Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play

A surprising, groundbreaking, and fiercely entertaining medical history that is both a collective narrative of women’s bodies and a call to action for a new conversation around women’s health.

For as long as medicine has been a practice, women's bodies have been treated like objects to be practiced on: examined and ignored, idealized and sexualized, shamed, subjugated, mutilated, and dismissed. The history of women’s healthcare is a story in which women themselves have too often been voiceless—a narrative instead written from the perspective of men who styled themselves as authorities on the female of the species, yet uninformed by women’s own voices, thoughts, fears, pain and experiences. The result is a cultural and societal leg­acy that continues to shape the (mis)treatment and care of women.

While the modern age has seen significant advancements in the medical field, the notion that female bodies are flawed inversions of the male ideal lingers on—as do the pervasive societal stigmas and lingering ignorance that shape women’s health and relationships with their own bodies.

Memorial Sloan Kettering oncologist and medical historian Dr. Elizabeth Comen draws back the curtain on the collective medical history of women to reintroduce us to our whole bodies—how they work, the actual doctors and patients whose perspectives and experiences laid the foundation for today’s medical thought, and the many oversights that still remain unaddressed. With a physician’s knowledge and empathy, Dr. Comen follows the road map of the eleven organ systems to share unique and untold stories, drawing upon medical texts and journals, interviews with expert physicians, as well as her own experience treating thousands of women.

Empowering women to better understand ourselves and advocate for care that prioritizes healthy and joyful lives— for us and generations to come—All in Her Head is written with humor, wisdom, and deep scientific and cultural insight. Eye-opening, sometimes enraging, yet always captivating, this shared memoir of women’s medical history is an essential contribution to a holistic understanding and much-needed reclaiming of women’s history and bodies.

what I've always known.

This is a fantastic, thought out, well-researched collection of what a lot of us women already know. We've been being dismissed in the medical community for years. This puts it into greater perspective & I thoroughly enjoyed this listen.

A must-read for everyone — all humans!

Exceptionally documented, narrated, and championed entreaty that all females be seen, listened to, and cared for by the medical profession — research that actually includes women, research on the complexities of women, and equal care for the health and mental and physical well-being of females.

Mandatory Read For Everyone

As an Anthropologist - this book is key to anthropology of feminist theory & medical anthropology. A great book that should be a mandatory read for all students of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences.

Great read!!!

Great book!!!! Definite must read!!! If you want to understand why women’s health has seemed rather misguided at times, this book is for you!!!

Historical and hopeful

“To the readers who still need to partner with that imperfect system, I have a different message - that despite its copious and well documented flaws, it is staffed by people who are called to practice medicine because they do care. The purpose of this book is not to ruin your faith in medicine, nor to point fingers at the men who made it what it is, but to illuminate the narratives that began with them and still surround us today. About women’s bodies, women’s health, women’s needs and desires… Having heard these stories, can you imagine choosing to tell a different one?”