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.