In Doing Harm, Dusenbery’s extensive research provides evidence of the problem of medical sexism, and partners this analysis with interviews with women who have it firsthand.

Dusenbery, the editorial director of, has written about women’s relationship to medicine for years, publishing essays on abortion, maternity leave, Alzheimer’s Disease, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, and more in venues like Pacific Standard, Cosmopolitan, and Feministing. These complaints are minor in the face of the devastating stories and research compiled in journalist Maya Dusenbery’s first book, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick. (I’m fine now, thanks for asking, and the scar does, to be fair, look great.) While preparing for major surgery a few years ago, my surgeon, learning that I was a graduate student in English, responded, “Women love their novels!” (Which seemed like a great time to tell him that my sub-specialty was actually medical ethics.) After surgery, pretty much every doctor or nurse I talked to focused on how cleanly the scar would heal, as though I was more interested in the aesthetics of healing than in significant complications of surgery that were not yet managed.

Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery