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    Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
    Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
    Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
    Audiobook5 hours

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

    Written by Deirdre Cooper Owens

    Narrated by Allyson Johnson

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    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 nineteenth-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 nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 7, 2019
    ISBN9781541401419
    Author

    Deirdre Cooper Owens

    DEIRDRE COOPER OWENS is the Charles and Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and the Director of the Humanities in Medicine Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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    Reviews for Medical Bondage

    4.5/5

    75 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This was eye opening to anyone curious about medicine and the application of it, base on bias gender and how racism and prejudice has stood the test of time.
    • 5/5
      Very insightful and important history of the origins of gynecology in the US and the racism and abuse of black and poor Irish women that was the foundation of its knowledge and perspective. Those roots continue to influence and shape how black, brown and poor women are treated by the medical system today. If you see a gynecologist or know someone who does you need to read this book (I.e everyone should read it :)

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This book is an important read for everyone. It is also a hard one, both because of the subject matter as well as the writing style.The author uses multiple obscure and acidemic words that may not have been necessary, at least if the book was intended for a lay audience. I have an eclectic vocabulary, and there were several points at which I had to infer the definition of a word by context or look it up.The subject is very dark as well. It is also a part of U.S. and medical history I was completely unaware of.

      1 person found this helpful