All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today

by Elizabeth Comen

From the rah-rah feminist smoking ads of yesteryear to the rise of contemporary wellness culture, attending to the respiratory system has increasingly become coded as a matter of self-care for women, rather than healthcare. Women are inundated with pseudoscientific suggestions to meditate, to download a breath-counting app, to get more exercise. There’s even a magazine called Breathe (subtitle: “and make time for yourself.”) Granted, this began as more a cultural problem than a medical one, but as in eras past, the medical community now ends up taking its cues from the culture—in this case, one that says respiratory health is a woman’s problem to solve, rather than a doctor’s to diagnose. The same medical establishment that told women in 1929 that smoking was a path to freedom, now responds skeptically when women say they can’t breathe, despite their disproportionate exposure to environmental factors that can cause pulmonary disease.