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  • Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology by Deidre Cooper Owens
  • Jill E. Rowe, PhD, MPH, MA
Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology, by Deidre Cooper Owens, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017, 182 pp., $26.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0820354750

In Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology historian Deidre Cooper Owens describes the experimental work of early 19th-century American gynecologists John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman. These early gynecologists were known to perform experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs largely on poor, vulnerable, and otherwise subjugated women. Dr. James Marion Sims in particular is known as the father of modern gynecology.

Beginning in 1844, Sims performed his experiments on enslaved women in Alabama, even leasing some these women from slaveowners for the purpose of gynecological experimentation. Sims repeatedly performed his crude experiments without any form of anesthesia as he attempted to be the first to repair vesicovaginal fistula. For one woman it was only "after five years of medical experimentation" and "his thirtieth surgery" that Sims "successfully repaired [Anarcha's] fistula" (38). Sims's experimentation on enslaved Black women established him as one of the country's preeminent gynecological surgeons and eventually led to his becoming the president of the American Medical Association in 1875 and the American Gynecological Society in 1879. However, these experiments—by Sims, as well as his colleagues—also created and sustained medical fictions about their patients—one such fiction being the belief that Black women could withstand pain better than White women.

Owens argues that the great tragedy of the history of American gynecology is how deeply early, groundbreaking knowledge depended on the exploitation of enslaved women's bodies. This is a history produced through the exploitation of enslaved Black women's bodies (as well as the expertise of Black midwives). These were the same bodies that the larger society deemed inferior, inherently flawed, and blameworthy. By carefully reviewing medical archives for information on medical procedures performed on enslaved Black women, Owens's work brings to light what history had hidden. Her reliance on narratives and recorded personal accounts of slavery lends further significance to the voices of the Black women central to her study.

Owens notes that enslaved Black women could not decide to reject treatment insisted upon by their owners. However, she takes great care throughout the book to detail spaces where enslaved Black women exercised agency over their reproductive bodies, [End Page 1606] such as the ways they named their rapists when treated for medical conditions related to their assaults.

In the last chapter, Owens provides a short history of gynecological medicine in the lives of Irish women immigrating to the United States throughout the mid-nineteenth century. During that time, Irish women were also the subject of at times brutal medical experiments performed by Sims and colleagues, as typically they were impoverished and viewed as a population group not participating in the full humanity of other White Americans.

Owens uses medical case narratives, patient histories, and procedures transcribed in medical journals, judicial cases from appellate courts, physician's daybooks as well as formerly enslaved women's narratives to document the ways Black (and Irish) women's bodies were used in experiential medical procedures before the Civil War. The book sets out to expand the historiography of slavery and medicine and to humanize the experiences of these women. A major strength of the book is that the author centers her research on the experiences of enslaved and immigrant women rather than those of elite physicians. One flaw is the brevity of the case of Irish women in the final chapter. Despite this brevity, this book is well written and researched. Medical Bondage details enslaved Black women's essential role in the history of gynecology and serves as a foundational text for understanding the realities of gendered violence against Black women in the present. It will appeal to scholars in critical race theories, medical ethics, critical medical anthropology, critical feminist studies, and African American studies. [End Page 1607]

Jill E. Rowe
JILL ROWE is affiliated with Western Michigan University's College of...

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