Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology) by Deirdre Cooper Owens

This whole book can be summed up by saying it is way worse than you think. This medical historiography grapples with troubling histories of medical exploitation, cultural memory, and meaning-making in very different but equally generative ways. The women in the cases presented are known only by their first names, Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy (plus up to nine anonymous others) were rotated in and out of un-anesthetized vaginal surgeries by Sims. Using non-voluntary, uninformed subjects, Sims invented the duckbill speculum, perfected protocols for the successful suturing of vesico-vaginal fistulas, and then published the results in both US and international medical journals. There is not only scant archival traces of these women in history but also in their cultural legacies as depicted in 21st-century art, health activism, and cultural representation. This is an examination of the widespread medical exploitation black enslaved women and (in comparison) Irish immigrant women experienced, within the development of modern US gynecology. The book provides important socio-cultural context for readers, in addition to important framing of the women beyond their roles as patients or medical subjects alone. In so doing, the author illustrates their significance as enslaved women who have no choice in their impregnation, as well as being a research subject. Importantly, a number of these women were also skilled nurses who—being trained by Sims after other white male doctors abandoned him—were some of the most knowledgeable individuals in the world on modern gynecology, within its earliest stages of development. It is pretty well known that 19th-century white male surgeons—lionized as pioneers of the field—performed extensive gynecological experimentation on these groups of women. The list of acclaimed doctors includes Sims, along with John Peter Mettauer and Nathan Bozeman. The procedures these doctors perfected on black and Irish women’s bodies include ovariectomies, cesarean sections, and obstetric fistula repair.