In Catholic grade school, Emma Bolden has a strange experience with a teacher that unleashes a short-lived, persistent coughing spell - something the medical establishment will later use against her as she struggles through chronic pain and fainting spells that coincide with her menstrual cycle. With The Tiger and the Cage, Bolden uses her own experience as the starting point for a journey through the institutional misogyny of Western medicine - from a history of labelling women 'hysterical' and parading them as curiosities to a lack of information on causes or cures for endometriosis, despite more than a century of documented cases.