Vagina Obscura
An Anatomical Voyage
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Narrated by:
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Siho Ellsmore
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By:
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Rachel E. Gross
About this listen
A scientific journey to the center of the new female body.
The Latin term for the female genitalia, pudendum, means “parts for which you should be ashamed”. Until 1651, ovaries were called female testicles. The fallopian tubes are named for a man. Named, claimed, and shamed: Welcome to the story of the female body, as penned by men.
Today, a new generation of (mostly) women scientists is finally redrawing the map. With modern tools and fresh perspectives, they’re looking at the organs traditionally bound up in reproduction—the uterus, ovaries, vagina—and seeing within them a new biology of change and resilience. Through their eyes, journalist Rachel E. Gross takes listeners on an anatomical odyssey to the center of this new world—a world where the uterus regrows itself, ovaries pump out fresh eggs, and the clitoris pulses beneath the surface like a shimmering pyramid of nerves. Full of wit and wonder, Vagina Obscura is a celebratory testament to how the landscape of knowledge can be rewritten to better serve everyone.
©2022 Rachel E. Gross (P)2022 Spotify AudiobooksListeners also enjoyed...
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"Through her seamless storytelling and meticulous research, Rachel Gross shows how long we have misunderstood the bodies of half the people who have ever lived, how much we still have to learn, and how wondrous and rewarding that quest can be. Vagina Obscura is science writing at its finest—revelatory, wry, consequential, necessary, and incredibly hard to put down." (Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of I Contain Multitudes)
"Vagina Obscura is a marvel of a book—lyrical, compassionate, infuriating, insightful, and wise. Rachel E. Gross's exploration of the history, science and politics of female anatomy should be read by women, men, and everybody seeking to be smarter about who we really are." (Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of The Poison Squad)
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When it comes to sex, common wisdom holds that men roam while women crave closeness and commitment. But in this provocative, headline-making book, Daniel Bergner turns everything we thought we knew about women's arousal and desire inside out. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with renowned behavioral scientists, sexologists, psychologists, and everyday women, he forces us to reconsider long-held notions about female sexuality.
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Masterfully read, depressing yet thoughtful book
- By Boom Depleter on 10-10-14
By: Daniel Bergner
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The Compatibility Gene
- How Our Bodies Fight Disease, Attract Others, and Define Our Selves
- By: Daniel M. Davis
- Narrated by: Christopher Grove
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Most of the 25,000 genes we possess are the same for all of us. Compatibility genes are those that vary most from person to person and give each of us a unique molecular signature. These genes determine both the extent to which we are susceptible to a vast range of illnesses and the different ways each of us fights disease.
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If interested in medicine, got to read
- By Howard Sterling on 06-29-16
By: Daniel M. Davis
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Birth Day
- A Pediatrician Explores the Science, the History, and the Wonder of Childbirth
- By: Mark Sloan MD
- Narrated by: Mark Sloan MD
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
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"I delivered twenty babies in the summer of 1977. I was hardly more than a baby myself, just turned 24 and starting my third year of medical school." So began Mark Sloan's three-decades-long exploration of the wonders and oddities of human childbirth. Pediatrician, husband, and father, the author has attended nearly 3000 births since that long-ago summer, encountering everything from routine deliveries to tense labor-room dramas.
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Great Book - Heavy on the History
- By Robert Ingalls on 03-16-17
By: Mark Sloan MD
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The Gene
- An Intimate History
- By: Siddhartha Mukherjee
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 19 hrs and 22 mins
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The extraordinary Siddhartha Mukherjee has written a biography of the gene as deft, brilliant, and illuminating as his extraordinarily successful biography of cancer. Weaving science, social history, and personal narrative to tell us the story of one of the most important conceptual breakthroughs of modern times, Mukherjee animates the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices.
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It's a Wonderful Book
- By JKC on 06-02-16
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The Cancer Chronicles
- Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery
- By: George Johnson
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 8 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
When the woman he loved was diagnosed with a metastatic cancer, science writer George Johnson embarked on a journey to learn everything he could about the disease and the people who dedicate their lives to understanding and combating it. What he discovered is a revolution under way - an explosion of new ideas about what cancer really is and where it comes from. In a provocative and intellectually vibrant exploration, he takes us on an adventure through the history and recent advances of cancer research that will challenge everything you thought you knew about the disease.
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A quick read - hard to put down
- By Digital Dilema on 09-06-13
By: George Johnson
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p53: The Gene That Cracked the Cancer Code
- By: Sue Armstrong
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Jasicki
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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p53: The Gene That Cracked the Cancer Code reveals the tale of the search for this gene, as well as the excitement of the hunt for new cures - the hype, the lost opportunities, the blind alleys, and the thrilling breakthroughs. As the long-anticipated revolution in cancer treatment tailored to each individual patient's symptoms starts to take off at last, p53 is still at the forefront of the game. This is a timely tale of scientific discovery and advances in our understanding of a disease that still affects more than one in three of us at some point in our lives.
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Excellent story! Unfortunate narration at start
- By Adriana on 12-25-14
By: Sue Armstrong
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Evolving Ourselves
- How Unnatural Selection and Nonrandom Mutation are Changing Life on Earth
- By: Juan Enriquez, Steve Gullans
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
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Why are conditions like autism, asthma, obesity, and allergies exploding at unprecedented rates? Why are we living longer, getting smarter, having far fewer kids? If Darwin were alive today, how would he explain this new world?
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fascinating ideas and science
- By Joel on 07-04-15
By: Juan Enriquez, and others
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The Undead
- Organ Harvesting, The Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers - How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death
- By: Dick Teresi
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
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Important and provocative, The Undead examines why even with the tools of advanced technology, what we think of as life and death, consciousness and nonconsciousness, is not exactly clear - and how this problem has been further complicated by the business of organ harvesting.
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Eye opening
- By Amy Giglio on 07-01-18
By: Dick Teresi
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Headstrong
- 52 Women Who Changed Science-and the World
- By: Rachel Swaby
- Narrated by: Lauren Fortgang
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
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In 2013, the New York Times published an obituary for Yvonne Brill. It began: “She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job, and took eight years off from work to raise three children.” It wasn’t until the second paragraph that readers discovered why the Times had devoted several hundred words to her life: Brill was a brilliant rocket scientist who invented a propulsion system to keep communications satellites in orbit, and had recently been awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
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Role models for young women
- By mtsuda90 on 06-25-16
By: Rachel Swaby
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Birth
- The Surprising History of How We Are Born
- By: Tina Cassidy
- Narrated by: Angela Starling
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
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Performance
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Story
From evolution to the epidural and beyond, Tina Cassidy presents an intelligent, enlightening, and impeccably researched cultural history of how and why we're born the way we are. Women have been giving birth for millennia, but that's about the only constant in the final stage of the great process that is human reproduction. Why is it that every culture and generation seems to have its own ideas about the best way to give birth?
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important historical work, fascinating and fun
- By RT on 02-24-16
By: Tina Cassidy
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Ten Drugs
- How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine
- By: Thomas Hager
- Narrated by: Angelo Di Loreto
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Beginning with opium, the “joy plant,” which has been used for 10,000 years, Thomas Hager tells a captivating story of medicine. His subjects include the largely forgotten female pioneer who introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, the infamous knockout drops, the first antibiotic, which saved countless lives, the first antipsychotic, which helped empty public mental hospitals, Viagra, statins, and the new frontier of monoclonal antibodies. This is a deep, wide-ranging, and wildly entertaining book.
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Engrossing to physicians & lay persons alike
- By C. White on 03-08-19
By: Thomas Hager
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The Family That Couldn't Sleep
- A Medical Mystery
- By: D.T. Max
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
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For 200 years, a noble Venetian family has suffered from an inherited disease that strikes their members in middle age, stealing their sleep, eating holes in their brains, and ending their lives in a matter of months. In Papua New Guinea, a primitive tribe is nearly obliterated by a sickness whose chief symptom is uncontrollable laughter. Across Europe, millions of sheep rub their fleeces raw before collapsing. What these strange conditions share is their cause: prions.
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A great scientific mystery
- By David on 11-04-06
By: D.T. Max
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Doing Harm
- By: Maya Dusenbery
- Narrated by: Dara Rosenberg
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Editor of the award-winning site Feministing.com, Maya Dusenbery brings together scientific and sociological research, interviews with experts within and outside the medical establishment, and personal stories from women across the country to provide the first comprehensive, accessible look at how sexism in medicine harms women today.
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One of the most important books ever written
- By Dresden on 03-18-18
By: Maya Dusenbery
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Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, treating men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias in time, money, and often with their lives. Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates the shocking root cause of gender inequality and research in Invisible Women.
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What listeners say about Vagina Obscura
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- M. Curtiss
- 03-24-23
Read this book even if you don’t have ovaries!
So good I bought 10 copies for friends. Highly recommend to everyone regardless of gender.
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- beckster305
- 09-26-22
Performance distracted from fascinating content
I read this because it was part of NPR’s Science Friday book club, and because I had an Audible credit, I chose the audiobook. In retrospect, I wish I had read the ebook instead. First, I question the reader’s decision to read quotes by the scientists and subjects with an accented English based on their country of origin. It made no sense especially when many of these people were not writing in English. (Sigmund Freud, for example, comes off as a caricature.)
Then, there were many mispronunciations. I chocked some of it up to the fact that the reader is an Australian actress now based in New York, and perhaps things are pronounced differently. But the weird pronunciations were so numerous, that can’t be the only explanation. Here are some examples:
Plock for plaque
Sty-meyed (long i in the second syllable) for stymied (twice)
Pat (short a) for pate (meaning head)
Summerarily for summarily
Endocrineologist with a long i and a long e (and an extra syllable)
Extestential for existential
And then after going to all the trouble to put on a fake French accent for many paragraphs, reading the writing of a French woman in the ‘20s, she pronounces the sculptor Rodin’s name “Row-dun” (accent on the first syllable.)
Her reading got worse toward the end. Maybe she was tired? Perhaps this reader was not the right choice. Or she could have used a much better director or producer.
I read articles from Smithsonian magazine for people who are blind or are otherwise visually impaired. I am very conscientious about looking up how place names are pronounced, historian’s names, etc. (For example, if I didn’t know how to pronounce Valdosta, Georgia, you can be sure I’d do some research - especially if this was a book thousands of people will listen to.)
The book itself was fascinating. I learned a great deal in spite of the distracting performance.
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- Catherine M Malcolm
- 01-07-23
A must read!
If you or someone you know has a vagina, this book is a must read. ESPECIALLY if you are in healthcare. I honestly want to buy this book for every medical professional I interact with and give it to them as a gift so that they can be better at what they do. It is frustrating AND depressing at a profound level how little our bodies matter to anyone medically or scientifically. It is the best book from my list in 2022.
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- Maeve Fogle
- 03-29-23
Incredible!
This book has affectively changed my life. Gross is a master story teller and makes the history of AFAB peoples disparity incredibly fluid. As a woman I am outraged by so many of the themes presented here. A must read, even if you are not AFAB.
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- Lauren Brien
- 02-04-24
Great info! Questionable production choices.
I really enjoyed the content of this book, it was accessible and engrossing.
I hated a lot of the production choices made for this book. While the narrator has a lovely voice and delivery, and brought a great balance emotion and tone to the content, I wish they had been allowed to use their natural accent, because their American accent was just off enough that I found it very distracting. Also, it was clear that nobody with a professional biological sciences or medical background was available to help with pronunciation of medical and scientific terms. I don’t think that a narrator should have to have a degree in the sciences to narrate a book like this, but I feel like they were not set up for success by not having access to a scientific consultant or editor for pronunciation questions.
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- Beverly J
- 07-10-22
Fascinating voyage through female anatomy
As. Gynecologist, I thought I knew all of this. But there were very interesting facts that never make it into the medical curricula.
My only complaint is regarding the narrator’s pronunciation of some very basic terminology.
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3 people found this helpful
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- DMR
- 07-03-22
Good overall
Mispronunciation of scientific terms was a little distracting. Good content and it covered diverse stories within the topic.
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- Danielle C.
- 09-06-22
Please Re-Record This Important Book
The book itself is so well-researched and important. It should be required reading for medical professionals. Women who just want to be more empowered in the doctor's office and in the bedroom will also benefit. This book therefore deserves a decent narrator.
To be fair, I'm a linguist, so I always pay attention to narrators' accents, but usually in passing, or just out of habit. It has never been to the point of distraction until this book. Why was her pronunciation so inconsistent? Why did she randomly slip into a NY/NJ accent, but at other times sound British? Why did she "mispronounce" so many words (i.e., not say them the way an American would say them)? It turns out she's Australian but sells her voice acting talents in different accents. She was a terrible choice for an audiobook narrator. Someone also had the tasteless idea to have her read quotations from foreigners in this indiscriminate non-native-English-speaker accent, even if the quotation had been translated into English from another language hundred of years ago, and even if she has no idea how well the real, living person speaks English. When the voice actor reads quotes from an Australian researcher in her (the narrator's) native accent, it is a relief to listen to. Her voice is excellent for audiobooks. WHY ALL THE ACCENTS?! I considered returning the book so many times, but pushed through because the content is so useful.
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- Alexandra
- 01-19-23
Excellent content, awful narration
The reader mispronounces words and reads quotes by voice acting as the speaker. It is distracting from the content, which is accessible and engaging
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1 person found this helpful
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- Melanie W. Chadwick
- 03-03-23
Vagina Obscura
Fascinating and illuminating. Every woman should be more aware of her feminine parts. Literally Rachel Gross takes us beyond the surface.
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