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Medical Bondage
Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology | Deirdre Cooper Owens
2 posts | 4 read | 15 to read
The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistulae repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as “medical superbodies” highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.
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AuthorAnnaBella
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I am a Registered Nurse with 25 years of experience. Sadly, I have witnessed some of the atrocities inflicted upon black / brown women during the Antebellum Era during the course of my career. I enjoyed this book for the knowledge and truths told. It broke my heart though, to see that very little has changed from the 1800 to 2020.

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Medical Bondage is a quick read with a narrow focus: the experimentation on enslaved women in the effort to learn how to treat vaginal fistulas (inappropriate communications with other spaces, typically related to childbirth or other trauma). It is a bit redundant in places but interesting and well done overall.

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