Cooper Owens, Deirdre Benia (Author)
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.
...MoreReview Lawrence B. Goodheart (2019) Review of "Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology". Journal of American History (pp. 762-763).
Review Stephen C. Kenny (2019) Review of "Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology". The Journal of African American History (pp. 322-325).
Essay Review Sasha Turner (2018) Slavery and the Production, Circulation and Practice of Medicine. Social History of Medicine (pp. 870-876).
Article
Cryle, Peter;
(2012)
Vaginismus: A Franco-American Story
(/isis/citation/CBB001250105/)
Article
Wall, L. Lewis;
(2007)
Did J. Marion Sims Deliberately Addict His First Fistula Patients to Opium?
(/isis/citation/CBB000774465/)
Book
Green, Monica Helen;
(2008)
Making Women's Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology
(/isis/citation/CBB000932941/)
Article
Kenny, Stephen C.;
(2007)
`I can do the child no good': Dr. Sims and the Enslaved Infants of Montgomery, Alabama
(/isis/citation/CBB000772500/)
Thesis
Webber, Sarah;
(2005)
The “Unnecessary” Organ: A History of Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States, 1865--1995
(/isis/citation/CBB001561871/)
Article
Nolte, Karen;
(2008)
Carcinoma Uteri and “Sexual Debauchery”---Morality, Cancer and Gender in the Nineteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB000774299/)
Article
Tanfer Emin Tunc;
(2022)
The Autobiography of a Neurasthene (1910): The Medical Counternarratives of Margaret Abigail Cleaves, MD
(/isis/citation/CBB737134786/)
Book
Lopez Sanchez, Oliva;
(2007)
De la costilla de Adán al útero de Eva: el cuerpo femenino en el imaginario médico y social del siglo XIX
(/isis/citation/CBB001022248/)
Thesis
Emily A. Seitz;
(2021)
Prescribing Pregnancy Loss: Women Physicians and the Changing Boundaries of Fetal Life in Nineteenth-Century America
(/isis/citation/CBB308650357/)
Article
M. J. West;
L. M. Irvine;
(2015)
The Eponymous Dr James Marion Sims MD, LLD (1813–1883)
(/isis/citation/CBB196336168/)
Article
Schochow, Maximilian;
(2010)
In den Leib geschnitten. Produktionsformen des biologischen Geschlechts
(/isis/citation/CBB001032240/)
Book
Pietro Greco;
(2020)
Trotula. La prima donna medico d'Europa
(/isis/citation/CBB202472004/)
Article
Gennimata, Maria;
(2009)
Die Rolle der Frau als Mutter aus der Sicht der Arkteia-Riten in Brauron und der gynäkologischen Schriften des “Corpus Hippocraticum”
(/isis/citation/CBB001032275/)
Article
Felitti, Karina A.;
(2007)
El debate médico sobre anticoncepción y aborto en Buenos Aires en los años sesenta del siglo XX
(/isis/citation/CBB000831361/)
Book
D'Antonio, Patricia;
(2010)
American Nursing: A History of Knowledge, Authority, and the Meaning of Work
(/isis/citation/CBB001020410/)
Article
Demaitre, Luke;
(2001)
Domesticity in Middle Dutch “Secrets of Men and Women”
(/isis/citation/CBB000770459/)
Article
Esther Diana;
(2021)
Not only a female icon: The breast in symbolism and medicine (from the 14th to the 17th centuries)
(/isis/citation/CBB711184543/)
Thesis
Churchill, Wendy D.;
(2005)
Female Complaints: The Medical Diagnosis and Treatment of British Women, 1590--1740
(/isis/citation/CBB001561590/)
Article
Rosenberg, John;
(2012)
Barbarian Virtues in a Bottle: Patent Indian Medicines and the Commodification of Primitivism in the United States, 1870--1900
(/isis/citation/CBB001212647/)
Book
King, Helen;
(2007)
Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology: The Uses of a Sixteenth-Century Compendium
(/isis/citation/CBB000774187/)
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