Poetic Accounts on Women’s Health: I Knew A Woman

Personal Rating

I may have an alternative way of learning about things in life. Like some of us, I wasn’t that much enticed with textbooks from school. I instead learn history through historical fiction books, science through sci-fi novels, and problem-solving through mystery books.

In human biology, particularly female biology, I remembered being overwhelmed with black and white diagrams of body parts, as well as their hard-to-read names. I thought, if only there’s a novel for it so I can understand it better. 

Years later, I found “I Knew a Woman.”

The Female Caregiver

I Knew a Woman: Four Women Patients and Their Female Caregiver is the story of Cortney Davis and her work in the Women’s Health Clinic in a suburban city hospital. Part biography and part fiction, she reveals the most intimate workings of the female body through the medical cases of four patients, who are fictionalized representations of women in general. 

Davis alternates between stories of these four women with issues varying from teenage pregnancy to complicated menopause. Throughout, the reader will discover what an “os” is, debunk myths about the uterus, and know that our thoughts and memories significantly affect our bodies more than we admit. 

A recurring theme in the book, readers will also see how nurses and caregivers struggle to balance plain work and pure compassion – the lengths they go through to help their patients and their frustration on the limits of one person helping another. 

Furthermore, the clinic typically treats the vulnerable class – the working poor, foreigners without green cards, those without insurance, and women on welfare. Besides being schooled with the technical aspects of health and illness, this book will test your emotions on the vulnerability and strength of these women. It will alter your perception of humanity and medicine.

The Medical Poet

Cortney Davis is primarily a nurse practitioner but also a poet. Her name does not only appear in medical journals but poetry and essay collections and combinations of biography and fiction, such as this book. 

As expected from a poet, Davis’s words flow gracefully, and as beautifully as the female body she describes. But far from the sensual, Davis writes with the authority of a medical professional as well. She blends innocence with procreation, or ephemerality with diagnosis, in elegant prose that somehow adds humanity to cold, hard, medical facts. 

I admit, there are a few long paragraphs about medical routines that sometimes bore me, but other readers may find them more interesting. On the other hand, the health procedures are not squeamish for me, but they may be for sensitive readers.

The Female Patient

“It’s not easy to be a female patient,” wrote Davis. “… procedures in the field of women’s health care uncommonly invasive.” As a caregiver and a woman confronted with health issues of her own, the author gracefully tells what it’s like to be the one carrying the nursing chart, and the one the hospital bed. That is, to be the one extending help and be the one in need of it. 

I recommend this to readers from the medical field, of course, if they haven’t known of this already. The LitMed magazine of NYU lists Cortney Davis with Oliver Sacks, so readers of the latter may enjoy this book, as well. 

Most of all, I recommend I Knew a Woman to, well, the woman I do and do not know. This book sparks a much-needed conversation among women, especially those in the middle of health issues – physically, mentally, or emotionally. I hope future readers of this book will gain knowledge and find comfort the same way I did.