Dierdre Cooper Owens. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. Illustrations. 182 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8203-5135-3.
Reviewed by Karol K. Weaver (Susquehanna University)
Published on H-Slavery (October, 2021)
Commissioned by Andrew J. Kettler (University of South Carolina)
Deirdre Cooper Owens’s Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology traces the rise of gynecology; the participation of enslaved women as experimental subjects as well as medical caregivers in the development of the specialty; and the ways race and gender affected the reproductive health care of native-born, white women, enslaved women, and foreign-born Irish immigrants. Cooper Owens employs and analyzes a variety of primary sources, including doctors’ notes, hospital records, medical journals, and medical and photographic illustrations, to tell the stories of the so-called fathers of gynecology, to acknowledge the contributions of enslaved women to the medical field, and to highlight intersections of race and gender. She skillfully shows how the painful and necessary history that she has investigated relates to modern-day experiences of women.
Benefiting from the existence of slavery, the rise of gynecology in the United States occurred alongside other medical developments, including the construction of hospitals, medical publishing, and surgical innovations. Working in hospitals in the slaveholding South and in the urban North, publishing in medical journals, and using surgery to deal with women’s reproductive issues and injuries, medical practitioners like J. Marion Sims built their careers and reputations. Recognized as the “Father of Gynecology,” Sims was responsible for a surgical operation designed to deal with vesico-vaginal fistulae. Like other medical men, he made his name in the field by using enslaved women (as well as poor Irish immigrants) as both patients and staff.
The techniques for which Sims and his colleagues were responsible advanced because of slavery and enslaved women. The pressure placed on enslaved women to reproduce and the sexual trauma and abuse at the hands of white men, their fellow slaves, and even the physicians who treated them led to health conditions and injuries that early gynecologists studied and about which they published. Cooper Owens not only describes the exploitation of enslaved women but also wants readers to understand the medical contributions and skills of enslaved women. She stresses that they deserve to be acknowledged as “maternal counterparts” to the men credited with the development of gynecology (p. 3).
Employing the idea of the “medical superbody,” Cooper Owens explains how medical practitioners characterized enslaved women and female Irish immigrants as simultaneously healthy and sick, strong yet weak, and free of pain but in the throes of agony (p. 7). Despite stereotypes that emphasized the inferiority of these women, doctors and surgeons experimented on them and derived medical techniques that they then used on white, native-born women. The authority that white men wielded in relation to female slaves and Irish women resulted in procedures and knowledge that helped privileged white women, a population considered unlike and superior to slaves and immigrants.
To explore her topics, Cooper Owens analyzes a diverse array of sources. She read the notes taken by doctors like Sims, which recorded the excruciating pain enslaved women exhibited despite the belief that they experienced little to no pain. Cooper Owens also investigated hospital records that documented the admission of Irish women to northern urban institutions and the surgical trials to which they were subjected. She studied articles in nineteenth-century medical journals that detailed the procedures that enslaved women endured. Most strikingly, Cooper Owens’s detailed evaluation of photographic and illustrated primary source evidence visually lays bare the immodesty attributed to enslaved women that was then used by doctors to treat their bodies like objects unworthy of protection and respect. Stressing the contradictions inherent in the “medical superbody,” the author shows how the bodies and the contributions of black women as experimental subjects and nurses were erased in a nineteenth-century medical textbook by replacing them with modestly dressed white women.
The history that Cooper Owens presents is at times difficult to read. The trauma, the pain, and the experiments that enslaved women and poor Irish women endured are harrowing subjects. Cooper Owens professionally investigates these topics, clearly stating “it is not my intention to cross the line of objectifying these historical actors” (p. 6). By writing this history of US gynecology, she successfully shows how the bodies, hands, and minds of enslaved women were key to the development of the medical specialty. Moreover, her analysis hints at and makes connections to modern issues that black women face, including how black girls and their bodies are disciplined more strictly than non-black girls and how black women receive less pain relief.
The richness and creativity of Cooper Owens’s work offer additional research projects that she or other historians might pursue. Cooper Owens’s history documents the sexual abuse that female patients endured at the hands of gynecologists and the pornographic nature of some medical publications. Both topics bring to mind the sexual abuse charges leveled against gynecologists by women, including Evelyn Yang, the wife of former presidential candidate Andrew Yang. Perhaps, a medical historian might more fully and more pointedly consider the specialty’s sexually abusive past and its present failings.
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.
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Citation:
Karol K. Weaver. Review of Owens, Dierdre Cooper, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology.
H-Slavery, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56713
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