Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology 2018

The achievements of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these 19th-century gynaecologists performed experimental caesarean sections and obstetric fistula repairs, mainly on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why doctors denied these women their full humanity, yet valued them as 'medical superpowers', perfectly suited for medical experimentation. W Medical Bondage Cooper Owens examines the wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynaecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as the belief that black enslaved women could endure pain better than white 'ladies'. Even as medicine progressed, these doctors legitimised unfounded theories about whites and blacks, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities for decades. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centres to reveal how nineteenth-century American views of race, health and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in healing spaces such as slave cabins, medical colleges and hospitals.