“The Madness of Women: How Science Built Female Inferiority” is a sweeping, incisive history of how Western science helped invent, justify, and perpetuate the idea of women’s biological and intellectual inferiority. From Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen to witch-hunts, anatomical theatres, hysteria, craniometry, clitoridectomy, and today’s gender pain gap, the book shows how medicine repeatedly turned cultural prejudice into “natural fact.” With irony, narrative force, and rigorous scholarship, Silvia Bencivelli traces the long life of the “defective woman”: too moist, too cold, too emotional, too fragile, too sexual, too irrational — and therefore to be controlled, cured, silenced, or excluded. But this is not an anti-science book: it is a lucid defense of better science, one able to recognize its own blind spots. A powerful work of feminist history of science for readers of Angela Saini, Caroline Criado Perez, and Stephen Jay Gould.

Silvia Bencivelli graduated in Medicine and specialized in Science Communication at Sissa in Trieste. An authoritative voice in Italian science popularization, is active with podcasts and radio and television programs. Among her publications, Il dubbio e il desiderio. Eva Mameli Calvino (Mondadori/Electa 2023), Sospettosi. Noi e i nostri dubbi sulla scienza (Einaudi, 2019), Le mie amiche streghe (Einaudi, 2017). With Bollati Boringhieri has published Eroica, folle e visionaria. Storie di medicina spericolata (Heroic, mad and visionary. Stories of reckless medicine, 2023) and Tre colpi di genio e una pessima idea. Ascesa e caduta di uno scienziato squinternato (Three strokes of genius and one bad idea. Rise and fall of a loony scientist, 2025).

Introduction

Chapter 1. A Man Gone Wrong
Women According to Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen

Chapter 2. The Witch and the Wise Woman
Medicine, Theology, and Persecution in the Middle Ages

Chapter 3. We Liked the Revolution
Male Power over the Female Body in the Renaissance

Chapter 4. A Full Box
The Beginning of the Medicalization of the Body

Chapter 5. Still Better Than a Dog
Evolution, Beauty, and the Myth of Male Genius

Chapter 6. 113 Grams
Women’s Intelligence

Chapter 7. The Theater of the Salpêtrière
Charcot and the Invention of Hysteria

Chapter 8. The Yellow Wallpaper
The Surgery of Female Docility

Chapter 9. The Empty Pedestal
What About Today?

Acknowledgments
Further Reading