Fascinating history and collections of stories through animals and humans from the beginning to now. There's more now cause women’s bodies are still being controlled by men's opinions. They really have no idea since they don't share the lived experience. We are much better in our understanding but there is still so much more that has yet to be diagnosed and treated. Don’t get me started on hysteria since asylums are just a dark history on misdiagnosing women's reproductive pains and mental health.
But definitely a very engrossing narrative and history of the study of the reproductive system going through theory to procedures to different types of surgeries and in vitro and beyond.
Written more in a firsthand account through the eyes of each scientist from sources that are 10% of the back of the book. I enjoy nonfiction books when it isn't all facts and there are many anecdotes and stories of the humans that pioneered.

I love that this book exists. It's such an important thing to acknowledge that women haven't received the same attention and focus when it comes to medical and social awareness of issues that face female anatomy. It's essential to address the fact that society turns a blind eye when learning how the female body works. This book is a great first step, and I enjoyed the read.

Who knew reading about the reproductive system could be so fun! The boring old high-school biology class lecture is out of the picture because Vagina Obscura has made anatomy and sex entertaining and brutally honest.

"Though the vaginal microbiome looks from afar like a dictatorship, it's more of a negotiation ... When Simone de Beauvoir wrote that 'the body is not a thing, it is a situation', she may as well have been talking about the vaginal microbiome".

Trigger warning: female genital mutilation.

Gross is the biology teacher I wish I had, the sexual educator everyone deserves and a superb communicator. My only complaint is genuinely that the book isn't longer. She covers the widest range of vagina-related topics in extensive detail, varying between FGM, BV, the menopause, endometriosis, 'neo vaginas' for transwomen and IVF.

Gross is a fan of the science, but is open to the limitations that exist in the minimal existing research - including the lack of representation in study subjects that leads to the idea that only certain groups of society have the 'right' microbiome. Her response? Let's do more, and make it intersectional, taking into account additional circumstances, because "like eating a Reese's Cup, there's no wrong way to have a vagina" and our research needs to reflect this.

Between the darker points, which emphasise how rat poison is still an accepted treatment (albeit antiquated) treatment for infections and the lack of recognition that endometriosis exists and lacks treatment despite its prevalence, were hilarious insights into studies which led to public outcries of "Was duck penis study an appropriate use of tax payers money?" I really never considered how much animal testing went into understanding the body, let alone how many women had organs removed in further testing.

The vagina is truly, in my opinion, the most fascinating organ and Gross delivered THE biological breakdown I've been waiting for. She explored every element, from the ovaries to the clit, from the born vagina to the neo-vagina and detailed the life-changing contributions from female scientists often forgotten in history, who sacrificed so much for the development of science. As Gross says in her poetic and descriptive prose, your vagina is a planet and there's so much more to discover.

Thank you Rachel for this book, and thank you NetGalley for sharing the Arc. 5*.

If I were to start quoting everything I learned from this book, I'd end up with almost the entirety of the text. Wonderfully well-written and informative. Highly recommended for everyone.
Thank you very much to W. W. Norton & Company and NetGalley for the ARC!

An anatomical and historical book about the different parts of the female anatomy. This was very interesting and informative. Each chapter was more interesting than the last, the vaginal microbiome, the egg cell, the uterus, neovaginas in gender affirmation surgery. I was disappointed that there was no section on the fallopian tubes, which I was looking forward to reading more about, having had an issue with my own. It might be that there is a lack of information, which is one of the themes of this book; most of the parts covered suffer from a kind of oversight or under-studying, due in part to historical focus more on male anatomy but also lack of interest by the general medical community. Maybe no one is looking into the mysteries of the fallopian tubes. 4 stars

This is a celebration of the vagina and everything its connected to and constructed and reconstructed vaginas and that whole - well it takes Gross a big chunk of her introduction to explain exactly what it is about because like a good science writer she does not want to be exclusionary (she often apologises for old terms in quotes, calls out bias in footnotes and the last two chapters are broadly about transgender people and vaginas). And as it is a history of our understanding of the female sexual organs it is crammed full of misunderstanding, misogyny (direct and non-direct), shame, pain and ignorance. A lot of ignorance. And certainly the early sections, when talking about what is understood - both ignorance and lack of interest crop up again and again, and the suggestion that women are just failed / deformed or mutations of men is remarkably common. Even here though, whilst Gross writes stridently for a women's history of the vagina, she generously notes that penises - by virtue of dangling outside the body, are way easier to study.

This is a good bit of popular science, story led into her various topics, logical in its decision on how to deal with topics.. History is well outlined, and often pretty tragic in this area, and pioneers questioned ethically as well as medically (slave owners who became gynaecological pioneers weren't doing it out of the goodness of their heart). There is also a solid selection of gee whiz science future stuff, the possibility of artificial ovaries, postponing menopause indefinitely and hopefully treatments for horrible conditions like endometriosis. But Gross keeps coming back to her central thesis that there just hasn't been anywhere near enough work done on women's bodies, and particularly this core region of difference. She calls out the historic sexism, and how slow science is to catch up (there is a great literature survey which should be called "Everybody's Talking About Penises").

In her introduction Gross specifically addresses this book to a female (and vagina having) audience, partially to identify those who will get the most out of it, but also as a rebuttal to all other science books which have been implicitly assuming a male readership. But I found it fascinating, the stories well drawn (albeit often pretty sad either medically or sociologically). I didn't know that the first case of IVF (in as much as fertilising an egg outside the womb) was in the forties, done by a female tab tech. I did know that Freud was an ass, and this doubles down on that.And the final couple of chapters on transgender and intersex issues around the vagina are full of some really quite sad stories (particularly decisions made at birth for intersex kids). Maybe I would have liked a slightly more universal conclusion, something a bit more celebratory of the vagina itself, but I rattled through this - it had an Emperor Of All Maladies feel of comprehensiveness whilst being at the tip of an ever changing and developing science. Like the clitoris, a lot is going on under the surface.

An intriguing read - I wasn't really sure what to expect at first, but thought I'd give it a go, and the book provides perspectives on many disciplines, from history, to health, to gender, to science. I would definitely considering buying a copy of this book for my daughters. Thanks to NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

It was only 20 years ago that the federal government mandated that researchers doing clinical research include women and minorities in said research. That fact, noted by As Rachel E. Gross in her non-fiction work Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage, goes a long way toward explaining the sad need for such a book in the 21st Century. After all, as Gross and more than one of her interviewees point out multiple times (and it bears repeating), you can’t see what you aren’t looking at or looking for. And for way too long, the medical/scientific community, comprised for most of its history of white men, has not been looking at women. Luckily, that’s beginning to change (though not enough, as Gross also notes that far too much of the clinical research that includes women is focused on fertility as opposed to other important issues), and luckily as well, we have Gross to give us a tour of that change with regard to this particular area.

Gross’ book grew out of her own not-so-great experience with the medical community, which was so akin to other women she spoke who see themselves:
as medicine has seen [them]: a mystery. An enigma. A black box . . . The women I talked to for this book were all made to feel that they alone had a complicate, unruly body. They began to suspect, or were outrightly told, that somehow it was their fault. That they should feel ashamed.

Gross does note that biology does offer some (slight) amount of explanation for why women’s bodies are more mysterious than men’s, as it is “more complex, more obscure, with much of its plumbing tucked up inside.” But by far the biggest reason is not “just a lack of tools . . .it was a lack of will . . .The marginalization of women’s bodies from science is largely due to the marginalization of women from science.” Gross tracks that marginalization all the way from ancient time to modern ones, pointing out theories such as the wandering womb, the debate over whether the clitoris actually existed, and nomenclature traditions such as the Greek’s referring to the sexual organs as “the shame parts,” the French anatomist naming the clitoris “the shameful member,” the way “many medical textbooks still refers to the vulva — all of the outer female genitalia — by the Latin word pudendum, which translates into “that for which you should be ashamed.” At times Gross is wonderfully, bitingly wry, as when she follows up describing how one mid-16th century anatomist “announced that had discovered the clitoris” by with an endnote pointing out that “by this time the clitoris had been known to Greek, Persian, and Arabic writers for over a millennium, not to mention . . . women.”

Gross gives her own detailed, up-to-date description/explanation of the various elements of the female system, the structure of the clitoris (far larger than long believed), the biology of ovary release, the uterus, the microbiome of the vagina, the existence or not of the fabled G-spot, as well as the newest advances in gender-affirmation surgery, along with far more problematic procedures such as clitoridectomies, female genital mutilation, and the surgeries long done on infants born “intersex.” Similarly to those last few, she also highlights the way in which women and minorities were horrifically exploited in the name of medical “advancement” by being operated on experimentally without their consent (or ability to give consent), some of the most shameful events in medical history (and often, as is typical for issues involving women, far less known that equivalent acts like the notaries Tuskegee experiments)

Vagina Obscura is sharply, vividly, lucidly written. Deeply informative and up to date, it’s an eye-opening work, which is only appropriate in a book that so details how what we look for determines what we find.

This is a fascinating journey into the largely hidden world of women's health. Throughout most of human history, women's bodies have been unknown. Modern medicine focused on men, treating women as other, and their complaints as often hysterical. This book sets the record straight, providing a wealth of information that all women (and men!) should know.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

I found this book fascinating and full of facts and historical data about our amazing anatomy. Having picked female health as my career I have always been in awe of the female system. This book has compounded that even more. What a great read.
It is beautifully written, and the information is professionally researched and highly informative. It's not difficult to understand and a book I would pick up again. Lots of information I was not aware of. Great read and well worth the 5 stars.

Thanks to Netgalley and WW Norton and Company for the ARC. This review is my own opinion.

I don't know what I was really expecting when I first saw this book, but I was pulled in by the cover immediately. The journey that Gross took me on was beyond fascinating. I loved the weaving together of science, medicine, sociology, and history. It was very difficult to put in it down. I also loved the inclusivity and the chapter discussing neovaginas. I will absolutely be purchasing a hard copy for my shelf.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for this eARC in exchange for my honest review.

Full disclosure: I received an ARC version in exchange for my review,

This was such a fun, infuriating, and wild anatomical journey through time and personal space! There were so many unbelievable facets and facts in this book, like that women used to have only 40 periods on average because they were constantly burdened by either pregnancy or breastfeeding. Modern women have around 400 on average. Some parts were shocking in a horribly relatable way, queue jokes about the arduous tasks of finding the g-spot or clitoris, the later of which was sometimes surgically moved to be more near the vagina(yes, really!).

Great writing, even better research! My favorite thing about this book was it challenged the view of my own body. I had no idea that my own view of my body was from vestiges of male science and gaze. This was the feminist book I didn't know I needed.

Very informative and fascinating, the type of books I would have liked to read when I was in my teens.
Informative, well researched, and detailed.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

My first life-changing read of 2022!

Vagina Obscura is an absolute delight to read. It does a deep-dive into each part of the female reproductive system, exploring its understanding throughout history up to the modern day.

This book takes a topic of much frustration for many women — that is, the lack of medical knowledge about the female reproductive system — and gives it the thorough exploration it deserves. The author delivers science, history, and personal anecdotes with life and good humor. I learned something on every page, laughed in every chapter, and finished the book with a much greater appreciation of the knowledge we have — and don’t have! — about the wonderful vagina and her neighbors. My curiosity about female anatomy has been completely reinvigorated.

I could not recommend this more highly!

Thank you to NetGalley for providing a free ARC in exchange for an honest review

This is an absolutely fascinating book that I wish I had twenty years ago. I'm going to recommend this to everyone I know, whether or not they have a vagina. I give my thanks to the author for her reporting on this topic and for bringing her findings to all of us in this gorgeous book.

After reading a few books recently in this subject area, this book popped up on my books you can request, and I was intrigued, by the title, the incredible cover but especially the fact it covered women's health and its history - and it makes for an interesting and intriguing read into the history of reproduction and the people behind each of these discoveries.

Well researched and incredibly informative, there are things in here I'd never thought of and chapters on the microbiome for example are really interesting, it is shocking how new some of the research is mentioned in this book and that is so infuriating, as women have existed, well *forever* and that it seems not as important to figure out causes for things like BV.

All of these chapters are enriching, the chapter on ovaries in particular there are facts in that chapter that I am not sure I'll ever forget, but also it is an exploration of research and a spotlight on how so much has been done so recently, the politics of women's bodies and the history being made clear throughout these chapters and the time much of this research was done in.

This book truly delves into the politcal and the personal when it comes to women's bodies and how society and medicine has shaped them today, and is so highly readable as the author introduces us to doctors and work that makes this book so incredibly fascinating from the first to the last chapter.

(I received an ARC from Netgalley for honest review).

fascinating, well-researched and easy to read - my favorite kind of narrative nonfiction.
Bonus - very funny!

Rachel Gross did an incredible job researching a topic that she writes has a serious lack of research. Her writing was approachable to a biology novice and yet still engages a reader familiar with the topics related to female anatomy. The choices of pictures were appropriate to the upcoming chapter. I found myself discussing talking points from the book to my high school niece.

*For those wondering it is LGBTQ+ friendly.

***Thank you NetGalley for proving me access to this preview. This review is based on a digital ARC. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.***

This is a very thorough look at the female anatomy, for centuries people in authority have decided what a woman anatomy is worth and this book will show you how important a woman genitalia is. For century men have decided that women shouldn't have pleasure when she is intimate and again this book will show you it's not true. What I like the most about this book is the discussion on the new research that is important to women, such as endometriosis, because for years it wasn't important enough but it should have been.
Another part of this book I liked is learning how anatomically close a male and female is and all it is, is chemical and most parts are interchangeable which is very interesting and should show how equal we are.
I found the best way to read this book is take your time and enjoy the immersion into the female world that matters to us and you will learn a lot. By the way the artwork is fabulous.

I want to thank W. W. Norton & Company and NetGalley for the privileges' of reading this beautiful book