Prescribed Norms: Women and Health in Canada and the United States since 1800

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. Canadian Bulletin of Medical History

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. Social History

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

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. Watermark

Bodies are a source of anxiety, pleasure, and pain. Prescribed Norms tells us just what this has meant for North American women over the past 200 years. No one but Cheryl Krasnick Warsh could be so compelling in explaining why girls and women of every age and in every community in Canada and the United States should have the power to control their own bodies. We owe her a debt of thanks. Veronica Strong-Boag, University of British Columbia

Prescribed Norms is an impressively wide-ranging and witty study of over 200 years of women's health care and women's roles as doctors and nurses in Canada and the United States. As a contextual bonus, other parts of the world are added to the mix. Based on an exhaustive examination of the secondary literature, Cheryl Warsh presents readers with the complex reactions to and perceptions of women's bodies—awe and disgust, power and fragility—that dominate our past and present. Underlying her study is the challenge to 'embrace the chaos' of our bodily being and the need for medicine to do so as well. Wendy Mitchinson, University of Waterloo