Afterbirth

Cressida is a medical anthropologist. She studies the history of how medicine has dismissed women's somatic experience - how symptoms that cannot be confirmed by available tools become symptoms that do not exist. She wrote the book on it. Literally. Chapter four of her monograph examines the diagnostic category of hysteria and how it was operationalised to contain the complaints of women whose bodies were doing things the instruments couldn't see. Now she is six weeks postpartum, and her body is doing something the instruments can't see.