I Knew A Woman: The Experience of the Female Body (review)

Cortney Davis has written a remarkable book about the poetry and science of healing, about protocol and ritual, gnosis and diagnosis, and above all else she writes about the blossoming of hope. The laying on of hands. I Knew A Woman is a lyrical manifesto of Carl Jung's observation that "every personality has a story. Derangement happens when the story is denied. To heal, the patient had to rediscover his story." Davis writes that it is just as important to hear her patients' stories as it is to palpate abdomens or check reflexes.

From her own experience, Davis knows that patients can feel violated, vivisected, objectified. Women's reproductive organs are not only real internal organs requiring dilation and probing, but are also symbolic, a passageway to both sensual and sexual pleasure. For a college physical, her own first pelvic exam was performed by a family physician with her mother in the room. There she was, feet in metal stirrups, bare knees splayed, small sheet covering little. Be still, endure, was the message she received as a young female patient. The exam room was a microcosm of the world of vulnerability, of visceral and personal invasion, where a woman's voice often was not heard.

Davis writes about her first contact with nurses. She was twelve when a horseback riding accident dislodged a blood clot:

It was the nurses who kept me company. Young, dressed in starched white uniforms with cupcake bonnets or winged caps that made them look like angels, they cajoled and mothered me. If I needed them, they appeared at my bedside instantly. I thought the polished hospital floor must be made of ice and the nurses must be skaters, whooshing quietly from room to room with thin sharp blades on their white shoes.

Davis, now a nurse practitioner, pays attention to details: a warm blanket for unveiled bodies, lamb's wool covering the cold stirrups. Her exam room is that sacred space where women tell what's on their minds, where nurses inflict pain in pursuit of healing. As Davis takes in their body language through her eyes and hands, their stories become part of her own.

Drawing on her experiences as a welfare mother and an impoverished single parent, Davis weaves the stories of four women, whom she cares for in the clinic, with her own. There is Lila, who is so thin that her bones stand out against her pale skin, a homeless, pregnant teenager, whom Davis tries to convince to go to a shelter for battered women. Lila has tried to kill herself twice:

When I see Lila, her shaggy hair and her untied shoes, I think of myself, newly divorced with no money for clothes, standing in line in the consignment shop but charging a stereo on my one overburdened credit card so I could listen to the Moody Blues after work and pretend that our family was like all the others. When I see Lila, seemingly so disconnected from all that's going on about her, I remember when I was so desperate for money I pawned a necklace my mother had given me for my sixteenth birthday.

Eleanor, a middle-aged housewife, math teacher and veteran of many pelvic exams, is evaluated because she has light spotting of blood after sex. Davis is with her when she must return to surgery because of bleeding after her cervical biopsy, when she undergoes a hysterectomy for uterine cancer.

Joanna, with her small heart-shaped face and all-black ensemble, is an artist who has inexplicable pain during intercourse, pain for which Davis cannot find a physical explanation. Reluctantly Joanna confides to Davis that perhaps she's allergic to sex.

Renee, with her broken teeth, pocked skin, and tattoos, presents a medical challenge because of her heroin addiction and unexpected pregnancy. Davis admits that Renee is her least favorite patient because of a long history of broken...