Deirdre Cooper Owens

With the title, it seemed as it was going to be encompassing multiple eras of history and groups so it was somewhat disappointing to discover it was only about the era surrounding antebellum south. Cause it seems like that should’ve been a good chunk of the book but not all of it. Like I was expecting the book to go over how being transgender has affected gynecology as well. Even then the book was still more about covering the procedures instead of the individual people & groups.

That said it was still a good read, I just think this is one of those where I’d be more interested in reading the person’s research for the book instead. And I’m still happy (happy’s not the right word) to have read this as I was able to learn a vast majority of medical advances in gynecology were at the expense/torment of slaves. Which while I want to say is surprising, at least to me, it isn’t as America was built on the back of racist institutions/disparities that still haven’t been fixed.… (mehr)

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.… (mehr)

This book was a little tough to get through because of the academic language, but I think this is an important book and a good contribution to the history of slavery, racism, and gynecology in the United States. There were a lot of tough stories to hear but Owens does her best to humanize all the women she calls the "mothers of gynecology" even when there is very little information about their lives. I liked her afterword where she talks about how some historians or critics of historians say that if you identify with the people you're studying then you can't be objective, but I think if you can't identify with the people you're studying then a lot of nuance will be missed. Owens is very deliberate about being empathetic and I believe that makes for a more accurate history.… (mehr)

An important if often grim read, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology explores the development of gynaecology as a field in the nineteenth-century U.S.A. Deirdre Cooper Owens argues that this aspect of medical history can only be fully understood through an examination of how white male physicians and surgeons exploited the bodies of women who were socially marked as inferior because of their race and class: in this instance, Black (and often enslaved) women and immigrant Irish women.

This is probably not the book to start with if you're new to the topic of medical/nineteenth-century history. While Owens' writing is accessible, it does assume some background knowledge on the part of the reader, and I think you'll get more out of this book if you already have some knowledge of Victorian-era medical practices. That said, Owens has done a masterful job in mining the archival evidence to recover as much as possible of the experiences of women whose voices so often go unheard in historical narratives. The numerous case histories she recounts are graphic, and often nauseating, testament, to the suffering of these women who, Owen convincingly argues, deserve to be seen as the mothers of the field of gynaecology.… (mehr)