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Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
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.
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.
182 pages, Paperback
First published November 15, 2017
241 people are currently reading
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About the author
Deirdre Cooper Owens
6 books47 followersDeirdre Cooper Owens is The Charles and Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and Director of the Humanities in Medicine program. She is also an Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer. A popular public speaker, she has published essays, book chapters, and blog pieces on a number of issues that concern African American experiences.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 344 reviews
August 11, 2019
This book was interesting and informative but repetitive. It seems it would have made a better paper than full book. As a full book, it could have been enriched by more connections to contemporary health. The author does a little of this in talking about her personal experience with fertility treatment, but there is not much in the way of broader connection. For instance, she makes much of the fact that it was thought Black women did not feel pain as white women did, which justified operating on them without anesthesia. However, most people were operated on this way at the time--the issue was lack of consent (which is addressed) than with anesthesia being withheld (which is not explained in the context of practice norms at the time). And the issue of pain generally could be better connected to the fact that many Black people in contemporary America are under-medicated for pain and that drugs for pain are often not available at pharmacies in lower income Black neighborhoods because of perceptions around illicit use vs. legitimate pain relief (even though prescription drug abuse is epidemic among whites). The information about Irish immigrant women is an interesting connection that doesn't seem to be fully realized. I'm not sorry to have read the book, but I wish it had been more comprehensive and less repetitive.
October 8, 2017
This book is an extraordinary statement on how the personal is always political, as enslaved black woman are finally given their rightful place in history as the mothers of American gynaecology!
June 12, 2023
What an eye-opener. Gynecology as a medical discipline was forged on the racialized bodies of enslaved women in the American south and of poor Irish immigrant women in the American northeast. For example, James Marion Sims, the “Father of Gynecology,” built his reputation on years of experiments on enslaved women with vesico-vaginal fistulas who were leased to him, then moved to the northeast where he worked on Irish women. At the same time, these women also laboured (sometimes in both senses of the word) in the institutions where they were experimented upon, and their labour as both experimental subjects and health care providers contributed to the development of medical science.
Deirdre Cooper Owens explores these women’s experiences, and the contradictions in the ideas about race, gender, health, and class held by the physicians who experimented on them. Ideas that black enslaved women were better able to withstand pain existed alongside a recognition of an individual patient’s ‘agony,’ for example. And while conventional wisdom held that black enslaved women and girls could not be subject to rape (due to ideas about their lasciviousness, and their lack of bodily autonomy), physicians treating the aftermath of sexual assault could not help but be at least intermittently aware of its impact. Although physicians posited that black women were fundamentally different from and more animalistic than white women, they experimented on black women’s bodies to learn about and develop techniques to heal white women’s bodies. Irish women too, were racialized and subject to many of the same ideas when they first immigrated to the US in the nineteenth century thouh they gradually came to be treated more similarly to white women over time.
A difficult read - and not the most smoothly written - but important to have read it. In an afterword, the author links some of the ideas that first took hold during the time of which she was writing to her own experiences as a black woman seeking fertility treatment (cervical dilation without anesthesia, ugh). Ideas about race, gender, and medical bodies that developed centuries ago have an insidiously long half-life.
Deirdre Cooper Owens explores these women’s experiences, and the contradictions in the ideas about race, gender, health, and class held by the physicians who experimented on them. Ideas that black enslaved women were better able to withstand pain existed alongside a recognition of an individual patient’s ‘agony,’ for example. And while conventional wisdom held that black enslaved women and girls could not be subject to rape (due to ideas about their lasciviousness, and their lack of bodily autonomy), physicians treating the aftermath of sexual assault could not help but be at least intermittently aware of its impact. Although physicians posited that black women were fundamentally different from and more animalistic than white women, they experimented on black women’s bodies to learn about and develop techniques to heal white women’s bodies. Irish women too, were racialized and subject to many of the same ideas when they first immigrated to the US in the nineteenth century thouh they gradually came to be treated more similarly to white women over time.
A difficult read - and not the most smoothly written - but important to have read it. In an afterword, the author links some of the ideas that first took hold during the time of which she was writing to her own experiences as a black woman seeking fertility treatment (cervical dilation without anesthesia, ugh). Ideas about race, gender, and medical bodies that developed centuries ago have an insidiously long half-life.
August 25, 2020
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.
August 25, 2018
I finally finished reading this brilliantly-researched and brilliantly-written book. It took me so long because it does not flinch from telling painful truths about just how terribly black women were treated as patients during the birth of gynecology in the nineteenth century. However, it also emphasizes how important many of these women were as nurses, midwives, and as sources of knowledge regarding women’s bodies and childbirth. Difficult but important reading.
November 8, 2018
Medical Bondage is primarily a history of gender and medicine but its implications flow out and touch everything we thought we knew about American history. In under two hundred pages, Deirdre Cooper Owens asks us to reconsider historical approaches to and traditional understandings of medicine, slavery, race, sectionalism and capitalism—to name a few. Cooper Owens joins the body of literature on antebellum slavery but by using medicine, specifically gynecology, as her framing device, she distinguishes herself. Medical Bondage places black women at the center of not only the evolution of modern medicine but the country’s economic development.
January 1, 2023
As per usual, this book was very informative. I knew about black womens’ history with racism in gynecology & obstetrics, but I had no idea Irish women suffered similar abuses.
September 8, 2024
Women are treated differenrly in medical situations than men.
Black women are treated differently in medicine than white women.
This text explores the historical background of gynecological practice in the US and the involontary role enslaved women played as white doctor's guinea pigs.
It is important to understand that while slavery has been abolished, differences in medical treatment kill black women at an unacceptable rate each year in the US to this day! (And while survival rates for all mothers are better in most aOECD countries compared to the US, false notions of female imperviousness to pain still make women suffer through bullshit everywhere on the planet)
The malpractice of treating POC women badly and ignoring their pain and symptoms must stop!
Also women need to be able to opt for a shot before getting intrusive, painful procedures done.
Black women are treated differently in medicine than white women.
This text explores the historical background of gynecological practice in the US and the involontary role enslaved women played as white doctor's guinea pigs.
It is important to understand that while slavery has been abolished, differences in medical treatment kill black women at an unacceptable rate each year in the US to this day! (And while survival rates for all mothers are better in most aOECD countries compared to the US, false notions of female imperviousness to pain still make women suffer through bullshit everywhere on the planet)
The malpractice of treating POC women badly and ignoring their pain and symptoms must stop!
Also women need to be able to opt for a shot before getting intrusive, painful procedures done.
September 7, 2022
Medical Bondage is informative but reads like a textbook and is distractingly repetitive with concepts and phrases. I was a bit confused by the organization of the chapters as well.
This is the first book I've read on this subject so I don't know how it compares to others like it. Still, I think it was a decent starting point for learning about this very important and horrific part of history.
This is the first book I've read on this subject so I don't know how it compares to others like it. Still, I think it was a decent starting point for learning about this very important and horrific part of history.
February 15, 2024
I'm a bit torn in my review: on one hand, the information here is very interesting and important (e.g., white doctors' abuse of Black enslaved women + enslaved women's own contributions to nursing/gynecology in the US; the idea of "superbodies" - which was especially well discussed in the afterward, when the author shared her own experiences of doctors ignoring her pain; ways in which slavery/dehumanization shaped medical practice and the ways in which medical practice, in turn, doubled down on slavery/dehumanization). On the other hand, I struggled with the book's organization (e.g., the same fact/finding is sometimes shared throughout the book, as though it hadn't been previously shared; I didn't always follow organization within chapters and wondered if the chapter order might be different). I also wondered if more information might be included when comparisons were being made (e.g., when stating differences between doctors' treatment of Black, Irish immigrant, and wealthy white women). This also read, to me, more like a textbook/academic writing than as a book for popular press (which may be the author's intention!).
So, overall, this book was educational + inspires me to read more about Black and Irish women's experiences and the history of medicine more broadly. However, I'm not sure if I would recommend this to other lay readers like myself.
Listened to this on audiobook: straightforward/clear, pleasant narration.
So, overall, this book was educational + inspires me to read more about Black and Irish women's experiences and the history of medicine more broadly. However, I'm not sure if I would recommend this to other lay readers like myself.
Listened to this on audiobook: straightforward/clear, pleasant narration.
September 18, 2020
This book is so very important and should be a must read for everyone, especially Black women.
The way Dr. Cooper Owens writes this history creates a narrative that I wish was taught in medical schools.
It addresses the grotesque history of Sims and other medical experiments done on enslaved women all in the name of science and to further modern medicine.
There isn't a chapter that I wasn't just sitting there with my mouth ajar.
This book was also written in a very accessible way.
The way Dr. Cooper Owens writes this history creates a narrative that I wish was taught in medical schools.
It addresses the grotesque history of Sims and other medical experiments done on enslaved women all in the name of science and to further modern medicine.
There isn't a chapter that I wasn't just sitting there with my mouth ajar.
This book was also written in a very accessible way.
December 29, 2019
Brilliant and important. Belongs in the canon of anti racist works. Especially important for folks dealing with gynecology. A must read.
January 2, 2025
I admit to being a little worried at the beginning of this book that this was going to be a justification of the exploitation of enslaved women that men like John Marion Sims used to their advantage to gain the knowledge that led to the foundation of gynecology in the US, but thankfully that was unfounded. This was an incredibly well-researched and detailed accounting of not only that aspect, but of the women and practices and attitudes of the time, and dealt with it all quite fairly. She gave these women as much of a voice and history as she could, which is saying something considering how little their identities and personal desires and lives were valued in society at the time.
As a woman living in the 21st century, I'm very thankful for gynecological medicine, and the treatments and procedures that exist, but I hate how we came by this knowledge. I hate the idea of these women being used this way, because they weren't viewed as people, but as property. Because their bodies were deemed to be more resilient to pain and trauma. While at the same time knowing that Black women's physiognomy is identical to white women's. There is no difference, yet the racist social attitudes of the time (and through to current day, let's be honest) allowed doctors to behave as if there is.
Highly recommend this, along with Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington.
This book is a bit drier and less narratively appealing, but still. It's well worth the read.
As a woman living in the 21st century, I'm very thankful for gynecological medicine, and the treatments and procedures that exist, but I hate how we came by this knowledge. I hate the idea of these women being used this way, because they weren't viewed as people, but as property. Because their bodies were deemed to be more resilient to pain and trauma. While at the same time knowing that Black women's physiognomy is identical to white women's. There is no difference, yet the racist social attitudes of the time (and through to current day, let's be honest) allowed doctors to behave as if there is.
Highly recommend this, along with Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington.
This book is a bit drier and less narratively appealing, but still. It's well worth the read.
October 30, 2017
A must read for any history student, especially those interested in past medical practices.
June 13, 2024
A solid 3.5–interesting and informative despite the difficult subject matter. The book provided an intimate history of the colonization of Black and Irish women’s bodies in the developing years of gynecology. Where the narrative fell off, though, was seeing this history through to the modern day. The book could use a few chapters on the evolution of gynecology and medical racism since the 19th century. Was also kind of repetitive, and there is so much information on this subject to be discussed?
September 22, 2024
This book is about such an important subject matter that rarely gets discussed. I felt like I learned a bit, but this just fell a little short of my expectations. It was extremely repetitive. Like SERIOUSLY repetitive. I also would’ve liked to have learned more about how the past has affected modern gynecology and how that ties into race and gender.
January 7, 2025
The afterword of this book made me cry! Although it was repetitive, I learned so much from this book. It was super interesting to read about both the exploitation and the (albeit limited) agency of enslaved women during pregnancy/medical treatment. Also, I love to read works from UVA Historians!!
January 31, 2021
I have had this book for a long time, and I've been grappling a lot for what it means for me to be a Black woman entering medicine. My interest in gynecology stemmed from my own understanding of the events I and Black women in my family have had to endure during regular gynecological exams or even childbirth.
Owens explicitly centers her work on rejecting the "socio-medical histories that do not question the veracity of top-down histories about 'great white medical men'" (9), and she does exactly that. Through extensive portrayals of formerly enslaved women as well as a review of medical literature produced in the 19th century, Owens displays how race and its construction around fertility, sexuality, and pregnancy were formulated to benefit medical advancement at the expense of Black women's wellbeing and agency. No more is this hagiographic narrative exhibited than through the exaltation of James Marion Sims as the "Father of Gynecology," a title that Owens rejects through her exploration of how enslaved women were not only experimental subjects but often worked as highly skilled and trained nurses. Of course, none of these "mothers of gynecology," as Owens labels them, are recognized for their contributions to the medical advancements linked to Sims. In fact, while enslaved women who practiced as midwives and nurses were exceedingly valued by white plantation owners for their expertise in birthing processes, these women still met confrontation in their interactions with owners and physicians who believed them to be of inferior intellect. It is extremely telling in Owens' account of her own experiences with the medical field how this power dynamic is still exercised in these spaces - how white people are the physicians and Black women and other women of color are nurses and ancillary staff.
Profoundly, Owens makes a connection between the contradiction of race-based science that is steeped in white supremacist views of the hypersexual and deviant black body. While slavery relied on Black women to continue to supply the economy with free labor, their well-being was never fully considered. Black women were expected to give birth often and quickly because of the pathologization of Black bodies as stronger than white bodies. The contradictions Owens displays include how Black women were used for medical experimentation that would eventually be translated to the care of White women. Black women not only had to experience this medical experimentation - they often did so without the protections and "modesty" guaranteed to white women. The Black female body, viewed as inherently sexual and thus able to be perused and explored without regard for the actual feelings of the patient, is still something we are contending with within modern medicine. Black women's stories about mistreatment they suffer at the hands of doctors links directly with the historical dehumanization of our bodies and of our psychological wellbeing.
While there is so much to discuss in this book (I haven't even gotten to the portion where Owens makes a striking point that James Marion Sims may have fathered a child by an enslaved woman on his farm - linking this to his desire to maintain a constant supply of sick Black women who he could treat and experiment upon).... it really is just something that is to be experienced. It is a difficult read for sure - the stories of young Black women being harmed time and time again really hits something deep inside me. To live in this world as a Black woman is for people to really not perceive you as human - for people to perceive you as something to look at, to experiment on - to not take seriously.
As a future physician, I want to right these wrongs. I want to center the practices of Black women who continue to work as doulas and midwives and to really connect with the practices of care and community that we have and continue to implement with one another. This was a fantastic read and one I think we all can find value from learning from.
Owens explicitly centers her work on rejecting the "socio-medical histories that do not question the veracity of top-down histories about 'great white medical men'" (9), and she does exactly that. Through extensive portrayals of formerly enslaved women as well as a review of medical literature produced in the 19th century, Owens displays how race and its construction around fertility, sexuality, and pregnancy were formulated to benefit medical advancement at the expense of Black women's wellbeing and agency. No more is this hagiographic narrative exhibited than through the exaltation of James Marion Sims as the "Father of Gynecology," a title that Owens rejects through her exploration of how enslaved women were not only experimental subjects but often worked as highly skilled and trained nurses. Of course, none of these "mothers of gynecology," as Owens labels them, are recognized for their contributions to the medical advancements linked to Sims. In fact, while enslaved women who practiced as midwives and nurses were exceedingly valued by white plantation owners for their expertise in birthing processes, these women still met confrontation in their interactions with owners and physicians who believed them to be of inferior intellect. It is extremely telling in Owens' account of her own experiences with the medical field how this power dynamic is still exercised in these spaces - how white people are the physicians and Black women and other women of color are nurses and ancillary staff.
Profoundly, Owens makes a connection between the contradiction of race-based science that is steeped in white supremacist views of the hypersexual and deviant black body. While slavery relied on Black women to continue to supply the economy with free labor, their well-being was never fully considered. Black women were expected to give birth often and quickly because of the pathologization of Black bodies as stronger than white bodies. The contradictions Owens displays include how Black women were used for medical experimentation that would eventually be translated to the care of White women. Black women not only had to experience this medical experimentation - they often did so without the protections and "modesty" guaranteed to white women. The Black female body, viewed as inherently sexual and thus able to be perused and explored without regard for the actual feelings of the patient, is still something we are contending with within modern medicine. Black women's stories about mistreatment they suffer at the hands of doctors links directly with the historical dehumanization of our bodies and of our psychological wellbeing.
While there is so much to discuss in this book (I haven't even gotten to the portion where Owens makes a striking point that James Marion Sims may have fathered a child by an enslaved woman on his farm - linking this to his desire to maintain a constant supply of sick Black women who he could treat and experiment upon).... it really is just something that is to be experienced. It is a difficult read for sure - the stories of young Black women being harmed time and time again really hits something deep inside me. To live in this world as a Black woman is for people to really not perceive you as human - for people to perceive you as something to look at, to experiment on - to not take seriously.
As a future physician, I want to right these wrongs. I want to center the practices of Black women who continue to work as doulas and midwives and to really connect with the practices of care and community that we have and continue to implement with one another. This was a fantastic read and one I think we all can find value from learning from.
September 18, 2020
The Afterword cements my overall feeling about Medical Bondage: This needed structural editing. There's a lot going on in this book - medical science's (i.e. gynecology's) collaboration in upholding and justifying race/gender/class myths, the story and legacy "the Father of Gynecology" J Marion Sims, acknowledging the literal and metaphorical labor of the enslaved black women Sims taught to nurse, experimented on, and raped, the ways in which these practices mutated when dealing with Irish immigrants in the 1850s due to different socio-economic conditions, and how all this flows into the present - and it's for the worse. It feels like an extended 40 page essay or several essays stapled together because of a constant repetition of concepts and somewhat obscure movement from one point to the next, without clarity as to what's being claimed an elaboration of the theory of "medical superbodies." That is, the medicalization of the female body reinforced by race, gender, and class stereotypes to create this notion of the non-white female body as brutishly durable and distinct while simultaneously using the knowledge gained from torturing these women to treat white bodies.
By the time you get to this integral point in Chapter 5, however, you're somewhat numb. It almost feels like this book should be read in exactly the reverse order in order to frame everything in a clear way. I might even recommend that tentatively. It's worth reading, but as is it's tiresome.
By the time you get to this integral point in Chapter 5, however, you're somewhat numb. It almost feels like this book should be read in exactly the reverse order in order to frame everything in a clear way. I might even recommend that tentatively. It's worth reading, but as is it's tiresome.
May 7, 2021
This will be in the running for my top nonfiction of 2021. There’s so much to digest here. Until my historian husband explained to me some of the history of American gynecology, I was ignorant of the fact the field began with doctors performing experimental surgeries on enslaved women. These doctors used the bodies of these women to further their medical careers, justifying this treatment by denying their humanity while also attributing superhuman pain thresholds to them. This was a grim read. A lot of this was hard to sit with and to stomach, but it is such an important account that centers the voices and experiences of these unacknowledged women.
Cooper Owens did a fantastic job of highlighting the tension that exists between the conflicting reasoning among these doctors (if you can test procedures on different racialized bodies because they’re the same bodies...how can you justify that some bodies are inferior? How can women be both weak and inferior while also having the superhuman pain thresholds you claim?). My brain was spinning considering the relationship between power and child-bearing among enslaved women and how birth could be both a rebellion and a submission. This thing is packed with so much to discuss about the relationship between race, gender, and power both in the history of our society and the history of medicine. I’m going to be chewing on this for weeks.
Cooper Owens did a fantastic job of highlighting the tension that exists between the conflicting reasoning among these doctors (if you can test procedures on different racialized bodies because they’re the same bodies...how can you justify that some bodies are inferior? How can women be both weak and inferior while also having the superhuman pain thresholds you claim?). My brain was spinning considering the relationship between power and child-bearing among enslaved women and how birth could be both a rebellion and a submission. This thing is packed with so much to discuss about the relationship between race, gender, and power both in the history of our society and the history of medicine. I’m going to be chewing on this for weeks.
February 6, 2020
Summed up in two sentences : "white men experimented on slave women without their consent (and Irish women with little consent) to develop gynecological surgical techniques, primarily repairing fistulas, conducting c sections, and removing tumors. It was brutal and inhumane." The summary of the book tells you everything you get out of the entire book. A terrible truth which deserves recognition, and I'm sure her research was extensive to go through so many medical records, but the narrative here was nothing more than a running list of examples. The commentary was highly repetitive and didn't add anything insightful to what I would already have thought about this brutality. Would have liked connections to the evolution of the specialty after 1900 and into modern medicine. Also if I never see the word parturient again that'll be fine.
June 17, 2021
A very important, informative and uncomfortable read. Highly recommended for women!
July 15, 2021
Read for a class... But this blew my mind. As someone who is pursuing research on various topics related to the history of women's reproductive health, this astounded me.
February 9, 2025
Thank you to the Philadelphia Free Library for lending me this book in exchange for my tax dollars.
October 1, 2022
Medical Bondage, by Deirdre Cooper Owens, is an examination of the widespread medical exploitation black enslaved women and (in comparison) Irish immigrant women experienced, within the development of modern US gynecology. It is pretty well known that 19th-century white male surgeons—lionized as pioneers of the field—performed extensive gynecological experimentation on these groups of women. The list of acclaimed doctors includes Sims, along with John Peter Mettauer and Nathan Bozeman. The procedures these doctors perfected on black and Irish women’s bodies include overatomies (the removal of both ovaries), cesarean sections, and obstetric fistula repair.
Cooper Owens centers the perspectives of the marginalized women in this history. In doing so, she joins a robust community of artists, bioethicists, physicians, activists, and humanities scholars who have worked for decades to carve out historical and cultural space for these women’s possible life histories and legacies (Barker-Benfield 1976, Daly 1978, Ojanuga 1993, Kapsalis 1997, McGregor 1998, Washington 2005, Kuppers 2007, Wanzo 2009, Judd 2011, Dudley 2012 and 2016, Christina 2018). As a medical historian, Cooper Owens focuses on the interplay of 19th-century scientific racism, medical doctoring, and the management of black women’s bodies and reproduction within the institution of slavery. She depicts the ways in which these elements converged, foregrounding the international rise of gynecology as a discrete branch of medical practice by the 1870s.
Cooper Owens provides important socio-cultural context for readers, in addition to important framing of the women beyond their roles as patients or medical subjects alone. In so doing, Cooper Owens illustrates their significance as owned women who were also multidimensional historical actors. Importantly, a number of these women were also skilled nurses who—being trained by Sims after other white male doctors abandoned him—were some of the most knowledgeable individuals in the world on modern gynecology, within its earliest stages of development (4).
In relation to methodology, Cooper Owens relies upon close reading and analysis of the following primary and secondary sources: 19th-century medical journals, physicians’ notes, judicial cases from appellate courts, physicians’ daybooks, the private diaries and plantation records of slave owners, census records, Works Progress Administration oral history interviews with former slaves, and slave memoirs (9). For socio-cultural context, the author also uses antebellum-era newspaper articles as well as medical texts and manuals. Cooper Owens adds to existing conversations in medical histories of slavery by zeroing in on the structural dynamics of gender, race, and medicine within the context of American gynecology, while also providing a comparative study.
The author’s work is not only well-done in terms of research design, but it is also well-organized and well-supported—including citations from the fields of medical history, history of slavery, literature, and women’s and gender studies. Cooper Owens lays out three goals: First, she takes the bondswomen associated with James Marion Sims seriously, as trained and skilled nurses (2). Second, Cooper Owens demonstrates that “reproductive medicine was essential to the maintenance and success of southern slavery” and also that “southern doctors knew enslaved women’s reproductive labor…[h]elped them to revolutionize professional women’s medicine” (4). Last, Cooper Owens focuses on the contradictions of scientific and medical discourses and practices. Racial science and medicine simultaneously positioned black bondswomen and non-native Irish women as—pathologically—outside socially constructed “norms” of human embodiment, and yet southern doctors relied upon their bodies for entrepreneurial medical advancement for broader humanity.
Significantly, Cooper Owens also conceptualizes the term “medical superbodies” in relation to black women’s experiences with slavery and white masculinized gynecologic medicine in the American South. She states that the theoretical classification “encapsulates the complexities and contradictions that were part and parcel of enslaved women’s socio-medical experiences” (7). Cooper Owens states further that “medical superbodies” “[describe] the myriad ways in which white society and medical men thought of, wrote about, and treated black women in bondage” (109). In addition to coining this term, Cooper Owens also provides an overview of the generations of European racial science literature and the positioning of US gynecology as a site for connecting stereotypical abstractions about black pathology to supposed concrete proof of difference. These racist and patriarchal scientific attitudes were represented in beliefs about supposed differences in pain tolerance, bodily proportions, sexual parts, lasciviousness, intelligence, skull size, and reproductive fecundity—which, of course, were all used as justification for subjugation and exploitation.
By placing the women at the center of the historical analysis, Cooper Owens invites readers to understand these women’s socio-medical experiences and see them as more fully fleshed out, complex human beings. Cooper Owens frames them as significant historical actors as well as the rightful “mothers of modern gynecology.” The author’s incorporation of case studies, oral histories from formerly enslaved people, and slave narratives provides powerful secondary sources of evidence.
While Cooper Owens engages with a number of relevant academic fields, it may have been interesting to consider what scholarship in the field of disability studies could bring to bear on the conceptualization of “medical superbodies” or in regards to discussions of the “medical gaze” woven throughout the book. Here, I’m thinking specifically of disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and her influential theorization of “extraordinary bodies” (1997).
Cooper Owens centers the perspectives of the marginalized women in this history. In doing so, she joins a robust community of artists, bioethicists, physicians, activists, and humanities scholars who have worked for decades to carve out historical and cultural space for these women’s possible life histories and legacies (Barker-Benfield 1976, Daly 1978, Ojanuga 1993, Kapsalis 1997, McGregor 1998, Washington 2005, Kuppers 2007, Wanzo 2009, Judd 2011, Dudley 2012 and 2016, Christina 2018). As a medical historian, Cooper Owens focuses on the interplay of 19th-century scientific racism, medical doctoring, and the management of black women’s bodies and reproduction within the institution of slavery. She depicts the ways in which these elements converged, foregrounding the international rise of gynecology as a discrete branch of medical practice by the 1870s.
Cooper Owens provides important socio-cultural context for readers, in addition to important framing of the women beyond their roles as patients or medical subjects alone. In so doing, Cooper Owens illustrates their significance as owned women who were also multidimensional historical actors. Importantly, a number of these women were also skilled nurses who—being trained by Sims after other white male doctors abandoned him—were some of the most knowledgeable individuals in the world on modern gynecology, within its earliest stages of development (4).
In relation to methodology, Cooper Owens relies upon close reading and analysis of the following primary and secondary sources: 19th-century medical journals, physicians’ notes, judicial cases from appellate courts, physicians’ daybooks, the private diaries and plantation records of slave owners, census records, Works Progress Administration oral history interviews with former slaves, and slave memoirs (9). For socio-cultural context, the author also uses antebellum-era newspaper articles as well as medical texts and manuals. Cooper Owens adds to existing conversations in medical histories of slavery by zeroing in on the structural dynamics of gender, race, and medicine within the context of American gynecology, while also providing a comparative study.
The author’s work is not only well-done in terms of research design, but it is also well-organized and well-supported—including citations from the fields of medical history, history of slavery, literature, and women’s and gender studies. Cooper Owens lays out three goals: First, she takes the bondswomen associated with James Marion Sims seriously, as trained and skilled nurses (2). Second, Cooper Owens demonstrates that “reproductive medicine was essential to the maintenance and success of southern slavery” and also that “southern doctors knew enslaved women’s reproductive labor…[h]elped them to revolutionize professional women’s medicine” (4). Last, Cooper Owens focuses on the contradictions of scientific and medical discourses and practices. Racial science and medicine simultaneously positioned black bondswomen and non-native Irish women as—pathologically—outside socially constructed “norms” of human embodiment, and yet southern doctors relied upon their bodies for entrepreneurial medical advancement for broader humanity.
Significantly, Cooper Owens also conceptualizes the term “medical superbodies” in relation to black women’s experiences with slavery and white masculinized gynecologic medicine in the American South. She states that the theoretical classification “encapsulates the complexities and contradictions that were part and parcel of enslaved women’s socio-medical experiences” (7). Cooper Owens states further that “medical superbodies” “[describe] the myriad ways in which white society and medical men thought of, wrote about, and treated black women in bondage” (109). In addition to coining this term, Cooper Owens also provides an overview of the generations of European racial science literature and the positioning of US gynecology as a site for connecting stereotypical abstractions about black pathology to supposed concrete proof of difference. These racist and patriarchal scientific attitudes were represented in beliefs about supposed differences in pain tolerance, bodily proportions, sexual parts, lasciviousness, intelligence, skull size, and reproductive fecundity—which, of course, were all used as justification for subjugation and exploitation.
By placing the women at the center of the historical analysis, Cooper Owens invites readers to understand these women’s socio-medical experiences and see them as more fully fleshed out, complex human beings. Cooper Owens frames them as significant historical actors as well as the rightful “mothers of modern gynecology.” The author’s incorporation of case studies, oral histories from formerly enslaved people, and slave narratives provides powerful secondary sources of evidence.
While Cooper Owens engages with a number of relevant academic fields, it may have been interesting to consider what scholarship in the field of disability studies could bring to bear on the conceptualization of “medical superbodies” or in regards to discussions of the “medical gaze” woven throughout the book. Here, I’m thinking specifically of disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and her influential theorization of “extraordinary bodies” (1997).
March 4, 2025
⭐️=4.75 | 😘=4.5 | 🤬=4.5 | ⚔️=5 | 17/18+
thoughts: well-written, salient, infinitely important. highly recommend.
thoughts: well-written, salient, infinitely important. highly recommend.
March 9, 2024
i read this for my history class it was fire. so upsetting and sad and disgusting, but so important. it got a little repetitive towards the end, but that’s ok
March 7, 2022
if you're looking for a broader look at the (ongoing) medical history and mistreatment of Black women in the u.s., 'medical apartheid' by harriet washington is the go-to, and from a more social leaning perspective, 'fearing the black body' by sabrina strings, both are absolute must-reads. although "race, gender, and the origins of american gynecology" are present in those books, 'medical bondage' fills in the gaps they left (understandably so, cooper owens's focus is specifically concentrated). as mentioned by most the reviews, the material is soul crushing, there's no other way to describe the atrocities. cooper owens does, however, give much of the attention to how medically skilled Black women were, free in west africa, and enslaved in the u.s., both by necessity -- caring for family, and by force -- nursing other enslaved people in plantation hospitals. cooper owens manages to give credit to the unaccredited Black women working in and experimented on in the field of gynecology, while acknowledging the horrific injustices; it's a difficult line to express, never glorifying or signifying it's a "good thing" they were there under either situation-- medical worker or patient (or experiment), but noting how white men doctors have historically been praised for medical advancements, while the work and suffering of Black women is ignored. which adds yet another layer of anger for the reader: Black nurses were just as -- if not more skilled -- than the white men doctors they were forced to work with/for. 'medical bondage' takes on a heavy burden documenting a heavy subject matter, where any kind of criticisms involving repetitiveness or length seem moot, especially when this (to my knowledge) is the fullest work of its kind, thus 4 gets a bump to 5. god is it ever disturbing how much we see as medical advancement today came not from genuine care for human beings, but to ensure further exploitation of enslaved people. just now are we getting a wider attention to it.
January 4, 2023
An excellent book and a must-read for those interested in the history of bias against Black women's bodies and the biased history and present of the medical system. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology outlines how the birth of gynecology as a field came through the hypocrisy and clear contradictions of doctors who both demeaned and disrespected Black women while also using their bodies objectified to further medical research. Medical writing contributed to the science of racism despite doctors knowing better—they used Black bodies to learn how to cure White bodies, so they surely knew those bodies were equal. Owens also compares the experience of poor Irish women and the experiments and bias they also faced, and highlights the ways these biases were different and similar. While I sometimes felt that Owens's arguments were out of order, and could have been more clear if reordered, this is an essential and relatively tome.
June 30, 2020
A thoroughly researched book about the fraught history of gynecology and the black super body. Owens does an amazing job of looking at intersection of race, medicine and body autonomy. She tells heartbreaking truths about how bond women and slaves were used for medical experimentation because they were thought to be less than human.
It is appalling to think about how these women were treated, and how their lives and autonomy meant nothing to the doctors who where using them for medical experimentation. This book is a hard look at how the personal is always political.
The only reason I gave this book less then 5 stars, is because of the audio book narrator. The narrator wasn't great, so sometimes it was hard to follow.
It is appalling to think about how these women were treated, and how their lives and autonomy meant nothing to the doctors who where using them for medical experimentation. This book is a hard look at how the personal is always political.
The only reason I gave this book less then 5 stars, is because of the audio book narrator. The narrator wasn't great, so sometimes it was hard to follow.
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