A Review of The Tiger and the Cage

It was in the eighteenth century that models of the uterus first became available to the general public in Europe. People had seized opportunities to view uteruses before, in Renaissance-era anatomy theaters, where crowds stood in concentric tiers around open female corpses. It wasn’t until the 1700s, however, when enterprising male anatomists manufactured wax models of the reproductive organ to be passed around, staged, and advertised. In other words, the uterus went on sale.

These objects, splayed open and dyed, were lopped off from any contextualizing sense of body or life; there was no way of knowing that some of them had been modeled on the anatomy of real women who had died during childbirth. In such anonymous shapes of tragedy lay the promise of exciting new knowledge. Three centuries later, it is unclear how much we have learned about the uterus or the catastrophes that regularly attend it.

Emma Bolden’s The Tiger and the Cage is a memoir about the author’s experience with endometriosis, a painful condition in which a person’s uterine lining grows outside the uterus. For Bolden, endometriosis has led to, among other complications, a pelvis fused with tissue, “large and hemorrhagic” cysts, and a fibroid “bulging” from the back of the uterus, bigger than the organ itself. Bolden underwent her third gynecological surgery in college, and by that time the cysts had her appendix surrounded. Because of their brown-bloodied look, her gynecologist called them “chocolate milk cysts.” It was too cutesy a term, but Bolden, a poet by training, is used to language’s clumsiness with bodily suffering. One of Bolden’s other gynecologists told her she had dysmenorrhea, a term that simply means “painful menstruation”: the symptom relabeled as diagnosis.

What do we do with pain? How do we communicate it to others without wasting ourselves on clichés, on botched metaphors, brute tautologies? Another doctor suggests to Bolden that her case is psychological: Was she perhaps molested as a child? His ineptitude inverts the premodern notion, equally cruel, that a woman’s mental illness stemmed from disturbances of the womb. Today, on average, endometriosis takes six to ten years to be correctly diagnosed.

Bolden is attuned to medical misogyny, and her memoir is interspersed with reimaginings of women who suffered similar ailments, or at least similarly caustic doctors. She is fascinated by Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot,...