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.

Cheryl Krasnick Warsh teaches history at Vancouver Island University and is the former editor-in-chief of the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History. A former Fulbright and Hannah Fellow, her books include Moments of Unreason: The Practice of Canadian Psychiatry and the Homewood Retreat, 1883–1923, Drink in Canada: Historical Essays, Children’s Health Issues in Historical Perspective (WLU Press, 2005), and Prescribed Norms: Women and Health in Canada and the United States since 1800.

Veronica Strong-Boag is a professor of women’s and gender studies and of educational studies at the University of British Columbia. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and a past president of the Canadian Historical Association. She has written widely on the history of Canadian women and children—including studies of the 1920s and 30s, the experience of post—WW II suburbia, Nellie L. McClung, E. Pauline Johnson, childhood disabilities, and modern neo-conservatism’s attack on women and children—and has won the John A. Macdonald Prize in Canadian History, the 2012 Canada Prize in the Social Sciences awarded by the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences and, with Carole Gerson, the Raymond Klibansky Prize in the Humanities. In 2012 Strong-Boag was awarded the Tyrrell Medal from the Royal Society of Canada for outstanding work in Canadian history. She is the author of Fostering Nation: Canada Confronts Its History of Childhood Disadvantage (WLU Press, 2010).

Cheryl Krasnick Warsh's profile page

In a tidy 300-or-so pages, Warsh lights candles into the darker corners of women’s medical history, the areas whose historically-perceived impoliteness made even medical professionals bristle.

<i>Watermark</i>

For not only tackling a gargantuan body of secondary literature, but then wrestling it into a sweeping synthesis as insightful and delightful as this, Cheryl Krasnick Warsh deserves a medal... maybe even two. This book will be particularly welcomed by teachers of the history of health, women's history, and women's studies.

<i>Social History</i>

The inclusion of a variety of women's experiences and the question of difference make this book a useful tool for teaching undergraduate women's health courses. Warsh's attention to the contemporary dimensions of women's health and recent debates around the HPV vaccine and alternative health practices is likewise a valuable teaching tool, as is her attention to discrepancies and limitations of historical sources on women's health. The book points to a need for future research on the expansion of health care and wellness practices in the late 20th century, including the rise of eating disorders and the physical fitness movement, as the very definition of health and normality continues to transform.

<i>Canadian Bulletin of Medical History</i>

The elegant scholarship, cogent arguments, and wit of Prescribed Norms provide illuminating perspectives that broaden the histories of women, gender, medicine, science, and technology.

<i>Canadian Historical Review</i>