Description
Cressida is a medical anthropologist. She studies the history of how medicine has dismissed women's somatic experience—how symptoms that cannot be confirmed by available tools become symptoms that do not exist. She wrote the book on it. Literally. Chapter four of her monograph examines the diagnostic category of hysteria and how it was operationalised to contain the complaints of women whose bodies were doing things the instruments couldn't see. Now she is six weeks postpartum, and her body is doing something the instruments can't see. At her routine checkup, she watches the ECG monitor and sees two waveforms: her own heartbeat, and another. Faster. Lighter. Distinct. When she points it out, her doctor looks at the same screen and sees nothing unusual. The second trace isn't there. Cressida is pointing at normal sinus rhythm, the doctor says. Everything looks fine. But Cressida can feel it. A pulse, slightly lateral to her sternum, beating at 110 beats per minute while her own heart beats at 68. It doesn't vary with her activity, her stress, her sleep. It doesn't respond to anything. It simply beats. *Afterbirth* is literary body horror about what happens when a woman who has spent her career documenting the gap between medical authority and embodied experience falls into that gap herself. It is about vanishing twin syndrome—the absorbed sibling, the surviving twin, the genetic material that persists. It is about pregnancy as occupation, about the body as contested territory, about the question of who gets to live inside a body and who gets to decide. The novel unfolds through Cressida's systematic documentation: audio recordings, spectrograms, daily logs, the careful accumulation of evidence that she knows, from her professional training, will be dismissed until it cannot be dismissed anymore. It is about the particular weight of being a woman who knows exactly how the system fails women, and who watches that failure happen to her in real time. As the secondary hea
About the Author
Cressida Vale is the author of "Afterbirth" and other works.
