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

Summary

Medical Bondage is a 2017 history book by Deirdre Cooper Owens, published by the University of Georgia Press. It tells the story of how the medical specialty of gynecology was built in the United States during the slavery era. Cooper Owens shows that the most famous early American gynecologist, J. Marion Sims, perfected his fistula surgery on enslaved Black women in Alabama between 1844 and 1849, and later operated on poor Irish immigrant women in New York. The book treats these women not just as victims but as nurses, midwives, and producers of medical knowledge in their own right. It also argues that the racial assumptions that shaped early gynecology still influence how Black women are treated in medicine today.

Argument

Cooper Owens argues that American gynecology was founded on a racial double standard rather than on a moral mistake some doctors happened to make. The new surgical specialty needed bodies it could examine, restrain, and operate on without legal or social consequence; antebellum slavery and postbellum immigration both supplied that material. The first women’s hospital in the United States was a slave farm in Mount Meigs, Alabama, where Sims operated on Anarcha, Betsy, Lucy, and roughly nine other enslaved women between 1844 and 1849.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Most of the pioneering gynecological surgeries in nineteenth-century America, including ovariotomies and cesarean sections, took place during interactions between white southern doctors and Black enslaved patients.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) After Sims left for New York, his Alabama hospital was sold to his former assistant Nathan Bozeman, a fellow slave owner who continued to experiment on a primarily slave population.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)

Reproductive medicine was not a humanitarian enterprise that intersected with slavery; it was structurally tied to slavery. After Congress banned the importation of African-born slaves in 1808, U.S. slave owners turned more attention to domestic births, and the field of reproductive medicine expanded in step.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Each woman sold was medically examined so that she could be priced for sale, and gynecological assessments shaped the antebellum slave market.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Cooper Owens argues that the field’s pioneers were not exceptionally cruel; they were elite white men working inside a culture of scientific racism that gave them ready access to the bodies of enslaved women.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)

In northern cities like New York, doctors relied on poor Irish immigrant women for exploratory gynecological surgery in much the same way southern physicians relied on enslaved women, because both groups were accessible vulnerable populations.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) After Sims’s 1852 article on vesicovaginal fistulae appeared in the American Journal of Medical Sciences, the journal’s publication of articles on sexual surgeries on women increased by more than 100 percent.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) By the late nineteenth century, physicians like Lucien Warner could explicitly link the two patient populations, writing that the African “negress” and the Irish “Bridget” shared good health and immunity from uterine disease, recycling the same superbody trope to fold both groups into the same experimental category.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)

Method

Cooper Owens’s methodological contribution is to recover the medical agency of women whom the archive was designed to obscure. Her key concept, the “medical superbody,” names a contradiction in white medical writing: enslaved Black women were cast simultaneously as physically superior to white women and as biologically inferior, a paradox that allowed them to be exploited as fit-to-suffer experimental subjects.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) She defends this term as deliberately messy because no antebellum-era label can capture the complexity of how doctors saw enslaved women, who were viewed through what she calls the two lenses of “simplicity and complication.”(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)

Borrowing Stephanie Camp’s concept of “geographies of containment,” Cooper Owens treats the slave hospital as an exemplary site of corporeal containment, where slaveholders enacted bodily restraint over patients.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Her central interpretive move is to read white doctors’ own writing against itself: physicians described in their journals how they restrained enslaved women during childbirth and surgery, a practice that contradicts the same physicians’ published claims that Black women were impervious to pain.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Anatomical practice itself should have refuted racial science, since doctors used identical surgical procedures on Black and white women, but their racial ideology obscured the implication that Black and white bodies were the same.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)

Cooper Owens also defends a methodology in which Black scholars’ lived experience and historical training make them more receptive to disturbing truths white historians have rejected, citing the long-disputed Thomas Jefferson–Sally Hemings relationship as her exemplar.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Her own cultural-historical reading led her to suspect that an enslaved patient had borne a child during Sims’s experimental years, and the 1850 census did record a mulatto baby on his slave farm.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) To capture how nineteenth-century medical writing flattened nonwhite women into stereotypes, she draws on Zora Neale Hurston’s metaphor of the “American Museum of Unnatural History,” where non-Anglo bodies are treated as “lay figures … made of bent wires without insides at all.”(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)

A final interpretive move reframes who counts as a founder of the specialty. Against Sims’s traditional designation as the “Father of American Gynecology,” Cooper Owens proposes that the enslaved women on whom he operated be regarded as the rightful “mothers” of the field, while acknowledging the basic asymmetry of the archive: patients do not leave records, doctors do.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)

Reception and the Encyclopaedia’s Use of It

Medical Bondage has become a standard reference for the history of gynecology, the social history of slavery, and the bioethics of consent. Cooper Owens closes the book with an afterword in which she describes undergoing two cervical dilations in 2015 without anesthesia or numbing shot during in vitro fertilization treatment, framing her own pain as continuous with the legacy of nineteenth-century medical bondage.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) She argues that the antebellum framing of Black women as medical superbodies remains alive in twenty-first-century gynecology, citing studies that Black women suffer chronic pain at higher rates with less access to pain medication.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) She closes by reframing her own scholarly task: in seeking the “mothers of gynecology” she discovered she is herself one of their daughters, a “marked woman” in the language Hortense Spillers offered her.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)

The encyclopaedia uses Medical Bondage as the lead specialist source for the gender/race/colonial historiography tier, the books that re-anchor the history of Western medicine on the bodies of the people on whom it was practiced rather than on the practitioners alone. Every claim drawn from the book is verbatim-traceable through the evidence cards in _evidence/cooper-owens-medicalbondage-2017/.

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

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

Summary

Argument

Method

Reception and the Encyclopaedia’s Use of It

See Also

Sources