LAUSR

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, ovari‐ otomies, and obstetric fistula repairs largely on poor, vulnerable, and otherwise subju‐ gated 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 signifi‐ cance 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, BOOK REVIEW