Description
Review
Working at the intersection of race, class, gender, and health, Owens presents a crucial platform for future researchers. This an intensive and sometimes uncomfortable read. ― Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Deirdre Cooper Owens explores how 19th-century doctors on Southern plantations and in northern hospitals, both progressed medicine, and also solidified racialized stereotypes that have dictated treatment of patients for centuries -- Evette Dionne ― Bitch Magazine
Medical Bondage builds on several decades’ worth of excellent scholarship on the experiences of enslaved women, health, and medicine under American slavery, a literature that has explored white medicine’s commodification, exploitation, and racialization of the enslaved, as well as the autonomy, creativity, and resilience of black healers and sufferer. . . Indeed, the author’s brave, provocative, and tireless promotion of this troubling history is to be admired and respected. -- Stephen C. Kenny ― The Journal of African American History
Cooper Owens’s well-researched book deserves to be read by a variety of scholars. Historians of medicine will appreciate Cooper Owens’s investigation into the development of US gynecology. Scholars interested in the history of slavery will find a very good study of the medical and physical experiences and contributions of enslaved women. Finally, scholars interested in women’s and gender studies will value Cooper Owen’s analysis of how race and gender influenced gynecology’s rise. -- Karol K Weaver ― Humanities and Social Sciences Online
Product Description
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 fistula 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.
Book Description
How pioneering gynecologists promoted and exploited scientific myths about inferior races and nationalities
About the Author
DEIRDRE COOPER OWENS is the Charles and Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and the Director of the Humanities in Medicine Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.