Narrating Endometriosis and Medical Neglect in What’s Wrong? Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine by Erin Williams

Endometriosis, despite its global prevalence, continues to be characterized by diagnostic delay, clinical uncertainty, and socio-cultural misrecognition. According to the World Health Organization, the time to diagnosis of Endometriosis often extends over several years, revealing persistent gaps in medical recognition and care. Beyond its biomedical framing, the condition is shaped by cultural attitudes that normalize menstrual pain, frequently resulting in patients being dismissed or unheard within clinical settings. This article approaches Endometriosis as both a medical and narrative problem, arguing that its invisibility and subjectivity complicate processes of diagnosis, interpretation, and care. Focusing on Erin Williams’s What’s Wrong? Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine, the study examines how graphic narrative strategies such as fragmentation, abstraction, and visual metaphor render chronic pain legible in ways that conventional medical discourse cannot. Through these techniques, the text reveals how patients negotiate disbelief and misdiagnosis, often being “expected to simply endure the pain… as if that were normal” (Cetera et al. 273). Drawing on frameworks from graphic medicine and narrative theory, this article contends that visual storytelling not only represents illness but also functions as a mode of knowledge production that challenges dominant clinical epistemologies. Ultimately, it positions Endometriosis as a condition that exposes the limits of biomedical authority while underscoring the critical role of patient narratives in reshaping understandings of pain, visibility, and care.

Endometriosis, Graphic Medicine, Chronic Pain, Diagnostic Delay, Embodiment, Medical Gaze Read Full Manuscript PDF