Our February LMCC meeting took place on Wednesday, February 22 at 5:30pm in Greenlaw 225 and via Zoom. We discussed Deirdre Cooper Owens’s 2017 
monograph, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology from UGA Press. Specifically, we discussed:
- Introduction: “American Gynecology and Black Lives” (pp. 1-14)
- Chapter 1: “The Birth of American Gynecology” (pp. 15-41)
If you missed the meeting, you can still access the text on the Readings page of this site!
Although we usually try to record our meetings, due to some technical issues, we were unable to record this particular meeting. However, for recordings of some of our past meetings, click here.
Please note that the rest of our meetings this semester will take place in the Greenlaw Conference Room, Greenlaw 225. We plan to return to the HHIVE Lab in the fall of 2023.
Our next meeting will take place on Wednesday, March 29 at 5:30pm est in Greenlaw 225. If you can’t attend in person, you can attend in real-time via our usual Zoom link. We will send out an announcement soon with more information for that meeting.
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Owens, Desirdre Cooper. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1pwt69x.
Some key passages:
Introduction: “American Gynecology and Black Lives” (pp. 1-14)
“This study of slavery, race, and medicine, on the other hand, makes a sustained effort to examine and understand the richness of the personal and work lives of slaves, especially of [J. Marion] Sims’s slave nurses. Their experiences offer us a lesson about the relationship between the birth of American women’s professional medicine and ontological blackness” (Owens 2).
“By examining the work lives of enslaved women patients and nurses through the prism of nineteenth-century racial formation theory, we can better understand not only the science of race but also the contradictions inherent in slavery and medicine that allowed an allegedly inferior racial group to perform professional labor requiring substantial intellectual ability” (Owens 2).
“This book, however, shifts the focus to the lack of recognition these women received as nurses, even though nursing was considered a feminine profession in which intelligence and judgment were valued. This book also demonstrates how slavery and racial science were self-contradictory in their assumptions about black people’s inferiority” (Owens 2).
“For pioneering gynecological surgeons, black women remained flesh-and-blood contradictions, vital to their research yet dispensable once their bodies and labor were no longer required” (Owens 3).
“…this book recognizes the unheralded work of those enslaved women recruited against their will for surgeries and made to work while hospitalized, and the labor of those poor immigrant women who willingly entered crowded hospitals in an effort to be healthy reproductively” (Owens 3).
“…this history evidences how race, class, and gender influenced seemingly value-neutral fields like medicine…. By chronicling the lives of enslaved women, this book demonstrates that slavery, medicine, and science had a synergistic relationship…it is a comparative study of black slave women, Irish immigrant women, and white medical men. It also delves deeply into the creation of antebellum-era racial formation theories about blackness: the idea that race was biological and determined one’s behavior, character, and culture” (Owens 3-4).
“Medical Bondage also builds on two significant arguments about the relationship between slavery and medicine. First, reproductive medicine was essential to the maintenance and success of southern slavery, especially during the antebellum era, when the largest migration and sale of black women occurred in the nation’s young history…. Second, southern doctors knew enslaved women’s reproductive labor, which ranged from the treatment of gynecological illnesses to pregnancies, helped them to revolutionize professional women’s medicine” (Owens 4).
“Most pioneering surgeries such as ovariotomies (the removal of diseased ovaries) and cesarean section surgeries that occurred in American gynecological history happened during interactions between white southern doctors and their black slave patients” (Owens 4).
“Within the crowded field of slavery studies and the growing genre of race and medical history, this book offers a different narrative about the history of American slavery, race, gender, and medicine. My research also proves that slavery and Irish immigration were intrinsically linked with the growth of modern American gynecology…. It reveals how nineteenth-century Americans’ ideas about race, health, and status influenced how both patients and doctors thought of and interacted with each other before they entered sites of healing such as slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. Racial formation theories were being created and debated just as women’s professional medicine was developing” (Owens 5).
“I have chosen to follow theorist Saidiya Hartman’s recommendation to not re-create the trauma and oppressive gaze that historical actors experienced at the time in my historical treatment of them…. I have attempted, however, to present these women as complicated, whole, and fully human, although the physical and psychological costs exacted by slavery were inhumane” (Owens 6).
“One of the more important functions of the ‘black’ objectified medical superbody for white doctors was that black women were used not solely for healing and research but largely for the benefit of white women’s reproductive health. They represented the ‘medicalization of life,’ whereby peculiar female diseases and even normal female biological functions were ‘problematized’ and placed under the ‘advice procedures’ of male experts who brought competencies within the orbit of an increasingly industrialized doctor-client relationship. It was a space where the medical superbody was the ‘epitome of consumerism’ and pedagogy. ‘She’ became ‘it,’ even in an arena like medicine, where patients were supposed to be treated as subjects, not objects. Medical Bondage is ultimately a historical telling of the impact of this medical scrutiny on the lives of enslaved women and poor immigrant women; it is also the story of the white medical men who fixated their gaze on these two groups” (Owens 7).
“Medical Bondage attempts to repair the gaping fistula in the historiographies of slavery and medicine, just as nineteenth-century doctors did for their patients. However, in my efforts to suture these historiographic holes, I humanize the experiences of the women who were both objects and subjects” (Owens 8-9).
“Medical Bondage joins a small but growing cohort of scholarship that interweaves the histories of slavery and medicine to investigate how each system affected the other. Further, this book elucidates how reproduction made the experience of enslaved black women markedly different from that of enslaved men’s” (Owens 9).
“Further, the work performed on enslaved and Irish women helped to legitimize this new branch of medicine. Like law, religion, and science, nineteenth-century medicine included many of the accoutrements of racism that marked ‘black’ bodies as inferior. They included the application of painful medical experimentations, without the use of anesthesia, even at a time when it was regularly used; separate and unequal medical treatment sites; and medical journals that racialized patients in their pages through idiomatic markers such as ‘robust,’ ‘strong,’ and ‘obstinate.’ ‘Black’ bodies, and this term includes all bodies treated as black ones, were, as theorist Lars Schroeder notes, ‘written as agentless objects of white medicine’” (Owens 11).
“Thus southern slavery was supported by the steady reproductive labor of enslaved women, and the reproductive and gynecological illnesses of these women aided gynecology’s growth” (Owens 11).
“Medical Bondage is organized chronologically, but a common theme runs throughout it: the importance of enslaved women to the development of American gynecology” (Owens 12).
“I argue that studies of American slavery must grapple with all facets of slave life, including medicine, because every person born under the institution lived through a medical experience. The study of medical experiences provides a foundational framework for understanding the lives of the enslaved and, by extension, the oppressed” (Owens 14).
Ch. 1: “The Birth of American Gynecology” (pp. 15-41)
“After Congress banned the importation of Africa-born slaves in 1808, American slave owners became even more interested in increasing the number of slave births in the United States…. It was not long before medical doctors and slave owners began to work closely to protect the reproductive health of black women who were held in bondage” (Owens 15).
“…an infertile enslaved woman presented a problem not only for her owner but also for those white residents who lived in a slave society dependent on black women’s reproductive labor” (Owens 16).
“Despite women’s predominance within the field, American doctors ‘masculinized’ gynecological medicine by creating institutions and cultivating pedagogical approaches for men who would work exclusively on women’s bodies…. As these men became increasingly concerned with formalizing medicine more broadly and legitimizing certain branches of the field such as women’s health, they transformed it into modern American gynecology” (Owens 16-17).
“Male midwives relied on the bodies of vulnerable populations like the enslaved and the poor to advance their medical research, to create effective surgical procedures to cure women of formerly incurable gynecological conditions, and, to a lesser degree, to provide a pedagogical model for physicians who were interested in understanding what they believed to be the biological differences between black and white women” (Owens 17).
“…slavery, medicine, and medical publishing formed a synergistic partnership in which southern medicine could emerge as regionally distinctive, at least through its representation in medical literature, and especially with regard to gynecology…. For pioneering southern doctors like Henry and Robert Campbell, the American medical journal served to legitimize their careers as much as the work they performed in early American gynecology served to authenticate their professional writings (Owens 18-19).
“Gynecologists’ ideas and practices demonstrated a broader belief that their forays into formal medicine should be trusted precisely because they were now leading a new medical field that was formerly the domain of women, who were considered inherently inferior” (Owens 19).
“Racial reification occurred in these journals when questions emerged about whether certain diseases, features, and behaviors were endemic to women of African descent, for example, steatopygia (enlarged buttocks), elongated labia, low-hanging breasts, and lasciviousness. The discourses on bondwomen and other racialized ‘inferior’ bodies gave rise to the ‘black’ female body serving as ‘a resource for metaphor,’ as literary theorist Hortense Spillers put it” (Owens 19).
“Southern hospitals that treated enslaved women who suffered from gynecological conditions proved to be critical sites where ideas about black and white biological distinctions were given credence” (Owens 20).
“Black women, like Mary, were exceptionalized in American society because of their blackness, alleged hypersexuality, and their seeming susceptibility to certain gynecological diseases. In reports of procedures performed on enslaved women, doctors used stark medical terminology that reduced black women’s reproductive organs and bodies to mere ‘physical specimens.’ Their organs were used as clinical matter that was displayed for observation and dissection so that white women’s pathologies and sick bodies could be cured. Although the biomedical research that nineteenth-century conducted sought to locate the alleged biological differences between black and white people, white doctors used black women’s bodies in their research because they knew that black women’s sexual organs and genitalia were identical to white women’s” (Owens 21).
“To be clear, male doctors viewed all women as inferior because they believed women to be neither as intellectually developed nor as physically strong as men” (Owens 21).
“Thus notions of black women’s innate inferiority worked in tandem with the tenets of racialized science. Like other branches of science, American reproductive medicine was greatly influenced greatly by biologically rooted racism and was not a value-neutral field, despite how vehemently doctors asserted that the field was an objective one. Enslaved women were perfect medical subjects for gynecological experimentation because doctors deemed them biologically inferior to white women based on their research findings, yet black women supposedly had a high tolerance for pain. Also because of the low status of black women, white doctors felt no obligation to give merit to their thoughts on the matter” (Owens 23).
“Thus American slaver and early modern gynecology have intertwined roots that are distinctly southern. As much as white medical men are lauded for serving as the ‘fathers’ of American gynecology, black women, especially those who were enslaved, can arguably be called the ‘mothers’ of this branch of medicine because of the medical roles they played as patients, plantation nurses, and midwives. Their bodies enabled the research that yielded the data for white doctors to write medical articles about gynecological illnesses, pharmacology, treatments, and cures” (Owens 25).
“Because the future of slavery and the South’s growing ascendancy as a global economic leader depended on black women’s fecundity and the birth of their healthy slave offspring, southern doctors found no shortage of bondwomen to examine and treat for various gynecological ailments” (Owens 26).
“Black people were alleged to be biologically distinct from and inferior to white people. This belief, however, had to be put aside when medical work was performed. Southern white physicians knew all too well that a black woman’s vagina and cervix were identical to the vagina and cervix of a white woman. Thus the gynecological operations were the same for black and white patients, even if the bedside manner and medical treatment differed because of racism…. How could these doctors explain, through their medical writings, that supposedly inferior black female bodies were being used to glean knowledge that was then applied to the treatment and cure of illness for superior white women?” (Owens 28).
“Gynecology was being formalized and legitimated on the reproductive organs and bodies of black women, yet in the literature doctors published, their bodies were not described as direct contributors to the growth of the new medical specialty. In nineteenth-century America, black women lived on the margins of society. Although black enslaved women represented a disproportionate number of the gynecological cases covered in medical journals, their inner lives remained peripheral in those publications. In their writings, doctors reduced the damaged reproductive organs and illnesses of slave patients to the knowledge they could provide for doctors” (Owens 32).
“After his [J. Marion Sims’s] white apprentices quit, Sims elected to train his enslaved patients to work as surgical nurses. The peculiarities of slavery meant that these women, all slaves whom Sims owned or had leased, would be trained as skilled medical workers, yet they would still have to labor as domestic and agricultural slave workers. It was a heavy double burden. Their situation illustrates the convoluted nature of nineteenth-century medicine in matters of race, class, gender, and status” (Owens 38).
“The increasing ability of Dr. Sims and other men to heal and repair women’s bodies encouraged the growth of gynecology as a profession and elevated it to a respected medical specialty. Their medical entrepreneurship also made them wealthy” (Owens 39).
“Thus the repair of any medical condition that could render an otherwise healthy slave woman incapable of bearing children further strengthened the institution of slavery. It was a system that valued enslaved women’s wombs, the robustness of their sex lives, and ultimately, the number of children they bore, but it was also one that accorded black women neither respect nor wealth. Because male slave owners frequently sexually exploited the black women they owned, it is entirely conceivable that some doctors had sexual relations with the enslaved women they treated. Thus, many slave-owning physicians, and possibly James Marion Sims, not only served as the figurative fathers of reproductive medicine but also may have been the biological fathers of the enslaved children born during their experimental work in gynecology” (Owens 39-40).
“Gynecological surgeons during the early and mid-nineteenth century were neither exceptionally cruel nor sadistic physicians who enjoyed butchering black women’s bodies, as some scholars have argued. They were elite white men who lived in an era when scientific racism flourished. Ideas about black inferiority were established and widely believed, as was the underlying assumption about black people’s intelligence. Black women, particularly those who were enslaved, were a vulnerable population that doctors used because of easy accessibility to their bodies. Further, the value of black women’s reproductive labor demanded that it be ‘fixed’ when it was seen as ‘broken’ by those who depended on their labor” (Owens 41).
“Black women patients had to navigate their relationships with doctors like [William] Darrach, who detested their blackness and yet needed to repair their bodies. Despite the entrance of white men into gynecology and obstetrics, black women still found ways to provide medical care for themselves outside the gaze of their owners and plantation physicians” (Owens 41).
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Note: Featured image is Figure 1.5, James Marion Sims’s first woman hospital, Montgomery, AL (1895), photographed by Edward Souchon (Owens 37).