Medical Bondage Audiobook By Deirdre Cooper Owens cover art

Medical Bondage

Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology

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Medical Bondage

By: Deirdre Cooper Owens
Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
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About this listen

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 19th-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 19th-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals.

©2017 the University of Georgia Press (P)2019 Tantor
Americas History & Commentary Medical Ethics Medicine & Health Care Industry Social Sciences Women Health care Thought-Provoking Scary Medical History Medical Nonfiction