Clear and concise yet brimming with historical research, Prescribed Norms provides a multi-layered history of women's health in Canada and the United States. Using numerous examples, Warsh recounts a socio-medical history that insistently operates within the paradigm of "masculinity equals health." Such a paradigm, she argues, limits and often discounts women's individual knowledge of their bodies and promotes medical research based on current understandings of women's health, even though this starting point may be misinformed. Sensitive to differences in class and culture, Warsh demonstrates how cultural rituals reveal varied understandings of processes like menstruation, menopause, and childbirth. She also discusses the growth of hospitals, the roles of midwives, and women as nurses and physicians.Challenging readers to rethink the norms of women's health and treatment, Prescribed Norms concludes with a gesture to chaos theory as a way of critiquing and breaking out of prescribed physiological and social understandings of women's health.