Medical Bondage

Front matter

American Gynecology

DEIRDRE COOPER OWENS

MEDICAL BONDAGE

CHAPTER FIVE Historical Black Superbodies and the Medical Gaze 208 Notes 727 Bibliography 243 Index 7259 viii CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS —_—_

FIGURES

1.1. Portrait of John Archer 29 1.2. Portrait of Ephraim McDowell 32 1.3. Portrait of John Peter Mettauer 33 1.4. Engraving of James Marion Sims 35 1.5. James Marion Sims’s first women’s hospital, Montgomery, Alabama (1895) 37 2.1 List of slaves owned by Joseph Glover, 1851 63 2.2. List of slaves owned by Joseph Glover, along with their occupations, 1851 64 2.3. List of slaves sold by Joseph Glover, 1851 65 3.1. Daguerreotype of Drana, a South Carolina slave 88 5.1. Dr. James Marion Sims and nurse repairing a vesico-vaginal fistula patient 723

TABLES

2.1. Health and Sale Statuses of Richland and Mount Pleasant Plantation Slaves 6o 2.2. Prices of Male and Female Slaves, 1859 and 1860 67 2.3. Comparison of Quantity of Cotton Picked per Week according to Slave’s Gender 69 4.1. Number of Reproductive and Sexually Transmitted Illnesses in Greater New York City 94 ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS —————————————

\ X 7RITING A BOOK ABOUT WOMEN AND MEN WHEN YOU CANNOT HOLD

conversations with them, observe their gesticulations, and look into their eyes is difficult. Yet writing books about subjects I am passionate about, interested in learning about, and inspired by is the reward for being a historian. I am overjoyed to produce a book that helps to place another piece of the puzzle on slavery and medicine together.

So many people, organizations, and institutions have supported me over the years. I am thankful for their assistance. I am indebted to the staff members at the following libraries for allowing me access to their records: the University Research Library at the University of California, Los Angeles; the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina; the University of Alabama Archives; the Reynolds-Finley Historical Library at University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB); the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the University of Pennsylvania’s University Archives and Records Center; the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Photographic Archives Collection, at Harvard University; the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health; the Library of Congress; the National Archives; and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), now the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. I spent nearly a month at the South Caroliniana Library, and Brian Cuthrell and Graham Duncan of the Manuscript Division were wonderfully attentive and helpful during my stay there. I owe a huge debt to Debra Scarborough, now retired from ACOG, for her professionalism, knowledge, support, and friendship. Debra introduced me to key texts on gynecological medicine, believed in my project from its inception, and xi located obscure sources for me. Mary Hyde, the senior director of the ACOG library, and her staff made my summer treks to Washington, D.C., pleasurable. Margaret (Peggy) Balch, of UAB’s Reynolds-Finley, proved a godsend in the latter stages of my process.

I was fortunate to receive external funding from a number of institutions, including UCLA’s Department of History, Center for the Study of Women, and Institute of American Cultures and the university’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African-American Studies. ACOG provided me with a generous and prestigious fellowship in 2007 that allowed me to gather much of the records I have on early gynecological medicine. Scholars at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson’s African-American and African Studies Institute selected me as a Postdoctoral fellow for 2008-9. I still consider my time spent at the institute as one of the most fulfilling professional experiences of my life. The University of Mississippi awarded me summer stipends in 2009 and 2010 that proved invaluable as I researched and wrote this book. The University of Limerick provided me a week’s stay, when I was able to present my research to my colleagues in Ireland who helped me locate new sources for my work and provided critical feedback. Further, portions of an earlier draft of Medical Bondage appeared as “Perfecting the Degraded Body: Slavery, Irish-Immigration, and American Gynaecology,” in Power in History: From Medieval Ireland to the Post-Modern World, edited by Anthony McElligott, Liam Chambers, Ciara Breathnach, and Catherine Lawless (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011). Last, Queens College, CUNY, granted me a yearlong sabbatical during which I was able to finish this manuscript. I also received a William Stewart Travel Grant from the City University of New York in 2016 that allowed me to travel and present my research internationally.

Of course, scholars build their work because others have cleared a way for each successive generation. My mentors at Clark Atlanta University, Dr. Janice Sumler-Edmond and Dr. David F. Dorsey, transformed my life. Each good thing I accomplish as a historian is because of my interactions with and training from these two scholars. I am indebted to my dissertation advisor, Brenda Stevenson, whose expertise on U.S. slavery still impresses me. Ellen DuBois, Joel Braslow, and Caroline Streeter were wonderful dissertation committee members. While I was at UCLA, Jessica Wang, Scot Brown, William Marotti, Ra’anan Boustan, Valerie Matsumoto, Gary Nash, and Marion Olivas, former director of UCLA’s National Center for History in the Schools, were most encouraging. My cohort members and fellow colleagues, Jakobi Williams, Miguel Chavez, Natalie Joy, Joshua Paddison, Jesse Schrier, Melanie Schmidt Arias, Stephanie Amerian, Mehera Gerardo, Sheila Gardette, Ebony Shaw, Lisa Boyd, Milo Alvarez, and Brandi Brimmer were wonderful colleagues. While in xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Los Angeles, I was involved in the Southern California Alumnae Chapter of Bennett College, my undergraduate alma mater, and the sista-friends I made there sustained me in ways that still move me deeply. Marilyn Mackel, Diana White, and the late Marjorie Penalver loved on me deeply, and I appreciate their friendship. At UVA, Deborah McDowell and Claudrena Harold mentored me. I still stand in awe of their genius. My community of Woodson fellows is still intact, and I am grateful for it. While I worked at the University of Mississippi, I was a member of a welcoming and supportive community in the Department of History. Thank you. My colleagues at Queens College, CUNY, are smart, hardworking, and supportive. The editorial team at the University of Georgia Press has been amazing. Walter Biggins and Thomas Roche, thank you for serving as editors who wanted the best from me for this project. I would also like to thank the Race and Atlantic World Series editors, Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Manisha Sinh, for supporting my work.

Finally, I give thanks to my village, especially three recent ancestors who continue watch over me: Larry Norbert, Rodney Craig Goodwin, and Nakia Spriggs. Scholars of slavery, gender, and medicine Jim Downs, Sharla Fett, Edward Baptist, Jennifer Morgan, Barbara Krauthamer, Steven Stowe, Celia Naylor, Natasha Lightfoot, Catherine Clinton, Christopher Willoughby, Kellie Carter-Jackson, Natalie Leger, Dennis Tyler, Sonya Donaldson, Brandi Hughes, Nicole Ivy, Shennette Garrett-Scott, Cherisse Jones-Branch, and all those who have read and provided feedback on my work. My sista-scholar group members, Sasha Turner, Talitha LeFlouria, Kennetta Hammond-Perry, Lashawn Harris, and Sowandé Mustakeem, have literally been my greatest support system since I entered the profession. Thank you and I love you all dearly. Also, my sorors of Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc., have supported me since 1992. My family, my maternal grandparents, the late King Solomon Cooper and Mary Cooper, a retired black nurse—thank you for helping to raise me as a proud Low Country South Carolina Geechee girl. My paternal grandparents, the late Mr. Ben Cooper Sr. and Pastor Ella Bell Cooper, privileged their family and their faith, and I am grateful to have experienced their love of both. My parents, Arliree “Tee” Cooper and Ben Cooper Jr., along with my stepmother, Alveta, have always supported me, even when I decided at thirty years old to move across the country and start a doctoral program with a new husband. Thank you and I love you for telling me I was simply the best since birth; more brown girls need to hear and believe this message. My siblings and their spouses, Adrienne and Richard Putney and Ben Cooper III and Marquita Raley-Cooper, thank you for your unwavering support and love (plus, we literally share the best laughs together). My aunt Geneva Isa has been selfless with me since birth—thank you. My nephews Nicholas, London King,

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Xxiii and the soon-to-be Paris Solomon: I do my work to prepare a legacy for you. Brooke Walker, you are my best friend and sister, thanks for the decades of love and support. Bryan, who knew nearly two decades ago that we would have experienced so much together? I am grateful for our journey, your gentleness, and your steadfast support of me. You have sacrificed so much to push me ahead unselfishly, often at your own expense. I love you.

xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MEDICAL BONDAGE

When invoking the term “body,” we tend to think at first of its materiality —its composition as flesh and bone, its outline and contours, its outgrowth of nail and hair. But the body, as we well know, is never simply matter, for it is never divorced from perception and interpretation.

—Carla Peterson, Recovering the Black Female Body

HE FIRST WOMEN’S HOSPITAL IN THE UNITED STATES WAS HOUSED ON T a small slave farm in Mount Meigs, Alabama, a lumber town about fifteen miles from Montgomery, a large slave-trading center. From 1844 to 1849, Anarcha, Betsy, Lucy, and about nine other unidentified enslaved women and girls lived and worked together in the slave hospital that Dr. James Marion Sims founded for his training and for the surgical repair of his patients. He had his workers, probably enslaved, build the hospital for the treatment of enslaved women affected by vesico-vaginal fistulae, a common obstetrical condition that caused incontinence, and that was brought on by trauma and by the vaginal and anal tearing women suffered in childbirth. Years after he performed his pioneering work, all experimental, Sims achieved success and an international good reputation. He would later be known as the “Father of American Gynecology.”

The women he operated on continued to perform the duties slaves were expected to complete. These bondwomen tended to the domestic needs of the Sims family, which included a sick child. They cooked, cleaned, stoked and kept the fire burning during the winter, fetched well water, wiped sweaty brows and dried crying eyes, planted and picked vegetables, and nursed their babies, all while serving at the same time as experimental patients. As Sims’s surgical nurses, they learned the fundamentals of gynecological surgery from arguably the most successful gynecologist of the nineteenth century. During the five years they lived on Sims’s farm, they helped him birth a new field. It is no exaggeration to state that these enslaved women knew more about the repair of obstetrical fistulae than most American doctors during the mid- to late 1840s.

In studies of James Marion Sims’s career and especially of his “Alabama years,” the occupational status of his enslaved patients as nurses has been consistently overshadowed by discussion of their illnesses. This study of slavery, race, and medicine, on the other hand, makes a sustained effort to examine and understand the richness of the personal and work lives of slaves, especially of Sims’s slave nurses. Their experiences offer us a lesson about the relationship between the birth of American women’s professional medicine and ontological blackness. During the antebellum era, most American doctors believed that blackness was not only the hue of a person’s skin but also a racial category that taught substantive lessons about the biology of race and the so-called immutability of blackness. Following this biological theory, a black woman could be the same species as a white woman but also biologically distinct from and inferior to her. By examining the work lives of enslaved women patients and nurses through the prism of nineteenth-century racial formation theory, we can better understand not only the science of race but also the contradictions inherent in slavery and medicine that allowed an allegedly inferior racial group to perform professional labor requiring substantial intellectual ability.

In the case of Dr. Sims’s slave nurses, scholarship has examined their exploitation as patients forced to work as surgical assistants. This book, however, shifts the focus to the lack of recognition these women received as nurses, even though nursing was considered a feminine profession in which intelligence and judgment were valued. This book also demonstrates how slavery and racial science were self-contradictory in their assumptions about black people’s inferiority. Although historical records list the New York hospital Sims founded in 1855 as the country’s first women’s hospital, we also know that a decade earlier he had created an Alabama slave hospital for women. During its last two years under Sims’s leadership, he taught his patients how to assist him during surgeries. Once Sims left the South for New York, he sold his women’s hospital to ajunior colleague, Nathan Bozeman, Sims’s former medical assistant and a fellow slave owner, who continued operating it as a gynecological hospital and treated and experimented on patients from a primarily slave population.' Like Sims, Dr. Bozeman later sold the hospital and returned the enslaved patients to their owners. He went on to advance his burgeoning medical career and promote his button suture surgical method, which he touted as more successful than the Sims silk suture method.

For pioneering gynecological surgeons, black women remained flesh-andblood contradictions, vital to their research yet dispensable once their bodies and labor were no longer required. Neither Sims nor other early American physicians viewed Sims’s slave patients as the maternal counterparts to Sims in his role as the “Father of American Gynecology.” There was no social or cultural impetus for professional white men, heavily invested in their racial, gendered, and slaveholding dominance, to do so. To remedy this failure to acknowledge their contribution, this book recognizes the unheralded work of those enslaved women recruited against their will for surgeries and made to work while hospitalized, and the labor of those poor immigrant women who willingly entered crowded hospitals in an effort to be healthy reproductively. Medical Bondage is not so much about historical recovery as it is about the holistic retrieval of owned women’s lives outside the hospital bed. I place them in the annals of medical history alongside the doctors who performed surgeries on them.

Slavery forced sick women to experience their lives in ways unimaginable to other Americans. Slavery created an environment in which black women performed more rigorous labor than white women and some white men. Because the agricultural work that all enslaved people performed was identical, doctors sometimes erased gender distinctions when they assessed the physical strength and health of black women. White people believed that black women could sustain the brutal effects of corporal punishment such as whippings just as black men allegedly could. When these women fell ill, a physical state where most people are allowed to be weak, white society objectified and treated them as stronger medical “specimens.” As a consequence, enslaved women vacillated between the state of victim and of agent.

The historical arc of American gynecology resembles other American histories in that it is triumphant. It is a polyphonic narrative that contains the voices of the elite and the downtrodden, and if studied closely, this history evidences how race, class, and gender influenced seemingly value-neutral fields like medicine. In works such as Sharla Fett’s Working Cures, Marie Jenkins Schwartz’s Birthing a Slave, and Deborah Kuhn McGregor’s From Midwives to Medicine, enslaved women and Irish immigrant women emerge as historical actors worthy of examination. These scholars have rightly focused on sexual violence, reproduction, and the family, and Medical Bondage introduces both science and medicine into the discourse. By chronicling the lives of enslaved women, this book demonstrates that slavery, medicine, and science had a synergistic relationship. It departs from the work of Fett, Jenkins Schwartz, and Kuhn McGregor not only because it is a comparative study of black slave women,

Irish immigrant women, and white medical men. It also delves deeply into the creation of antebellum-era racial formation theories about blackness: the idea that race was biological and determined one’s behavior, character, and culture.

Further, my study broadens the work of important historians of medicine like Todd Savitt who have focused on race and medicine but not examined the central role of slaves in the history of gynecology. Historians of race and medicine have recast different topics such as antebellum medical care, the health effects of emancipation, and late-nineteenth-century concerns about tuberculosis, race, and the city.” My work returns the discussion to the plantation while also examining how American gynecology developed.

Medical Bondage also builds on two significant arguments about the relationship between slavery and medicine. First, reproductive medicine was essential to the maintenance and success of southern slavery, especially during the antebellum era, when the largest migration and sale of black women occurred in the nation’s young history. Doctors formed a cohort of elite white men whose work, especially their gynecological examinations of black women, affected the country’s slave markets. Each slave sold was examined medically so that she could be priced. Second, southern doctors knew enslaved women’s reproductive labor, which ranged from the treatment of gynecological illnesses to pregnancies, helped them to revolutionize professional women’s medicine. Slave owners used these men’s medical assessments to ascertain whether a woman would be an economically sound investment. Was she a fecund woman or infertile? Did she have a venereal disease that could infect others slaves on a farm or plantation? These questions mattered, and doctors provided the answers for buyers. Most pioneering surgeries such as ovariotomies (the removal of diseased ovaries) and cesarean section surgeries that occurred in American gynecological history happened during interactions between white southern doctors and their black slave patients.

As a comparative study, Medical Bondage analyzes the medical experiences and lives of Irish women during the antebellum era, in addition to those of slaves of African descent. This study does not consider the work lives of Irish immigrant women as maids, prostitutes, and factory workers in every aspect but focuses in particular on the medical impact that gynecology had on them. By the 1850s, the massive influx of recently arrived Europeans had become intertwined with modern American medicine. There has been little written about Irish women’s reproductive medical lives, although many of these women experienced multiple pregnancies, like most American women of the antebellum era. This monograph shines a brighter light on the biomedical experiences of one of the largest groups of immigrant women in America during the age of slavery.

Poor Irish-born women relied disproportionately on hospitals and physicians in northern cities. In some urban areas, Catholic hospitals were founded to meet both the spiritual and the medical needs of Irish women. In cities such as New York, doctors relied on this patient group as subjects for exploratory gynecological surgeries in much the same way southern physicians did enslaved women, because these women were an accessible vulnerable population.

Within the crowded field of slavery studies and the growing genre of race and medical history, this book offers a different narrative about the history of American slavery, race, gender, and medicine. My research also proves that slavery and Irish immigration were intrinsically linked with the growth of modern American gynecology. Sims’s work on Irish immigrant patients, especially his first New York patient, Mary Smith, evidences that he practiced a form of nineteenth-century medicine guided by the belief that elite white lives should be held in higher esteem than poor, foreign ones even while he relied on immigrant and black women’s disorders to discover cures for the illnesses of all women. It reveals how nineteenth-century Americans’ ideas about race, health, and status influenced how both patients and doctors thought of and interacted with each other before they entered sites of healing such as slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. Racial formation theories were being created and debated just as women’s professional medicine was developing. American medicine was moving from the periphery to the center in global Western medicine largely because of the innovative surgical work performed by gynecologists. Pioneering gynecological surgical procedures, many of which were initially performed on enslaved women and later on poor immigrant women, were responsible for much of the field’s rapid advancement in cesarean sections, obstetrical fistulae repair, and ovariotomies. The import of these medical advances is immense because European medicine had previously dominated how physicians understood medicine in America. These theoretical and practical developments in women’s medicine began to transform the United States into a leader in modern gynecology.

Up until the late eighteenth century, U.S. physicians relied on the ancient Greek and Roman humoral system of understanding and treating the body.’ For example, American doctors, like their European colleagues, bled their patients to release toxins. The practice was a common one and was popularized by leading medical men such as early American patriot Benjamin Rush, who is now considered the “Father of American Medicine.” Early on Rush also asserted that blackness was a genetic pathology and taught his medical students that blackness was a form of leprosy.’ Although Rush’s theory of blackness as a disease seems rooted in the Western world’s general belief in scientific racism, he was asserting that black and white people were not different species. Thus blackness was not caused by natural anatomical differences, and ultimately black and white people were at least biologically identical.

American medicine came into its own after an American physician performed the modern world’s first successful abdominal surgery and southern doctors began to use surgical methods that permanently repaired reproductive conditions. The reverberations of these surgical triumphs were felt globally. Following the publication of James Marion Sims’s groundbreaking 1852 medical article on the treatment of vesico-vaginal fistulae repair, he received numerous invitations from European royalty to treat their female relatives for various gynecological conditions and diseases.

With Sims’s achievement, American frontier medicine, much of it occurring in slave communities, had become a leading source for medical knowledge production globally. Yet the central role that enslaved women played in these advances—by providing doctors the bodies and sometimes labor needed for experimentation, treatment, and repair—went unacknowledged. Modern American gynecology could certainly exist without slavery, but slavery’s existence allowed for the rapid development of this branch of medicine, and especially of gynecological surgery.

Like black enslaved women, Irish immigrant women faced a number of obstacles that obstructed their progress in society. These disadvantages included the debilitating physical effects of manual labor, sexual abuse, multiple births, disease, medical experimentation, and violence. My examination of the treatment of black and Irish women does not reduce them to uncomplicated victims of xenophobia and medical racism. I have chosen to follow theorist Saidiya Hartman’s recommendation to not re-create the trauma and oppressive gaze that historical actors experienced at the time in my historical treatment of them. In my regulation of how “pained black bodies” are discussed and interpreted for readers’ knowledge and ultimately their assessment, it is not my intention to cross the line of objectifying these historical actors.’

I direct attention toward not only enslaved women’s lives but also those who were treated as “black” and bring into sharper focus what happened to them medically. My theorizations about their experiences, pains, uses, and their bodies should not be read as another way of reifying black women as disembodied “objects.” Another challenge was locating sources where slave voices were not muted, filtered, or spoken by those who held power over them. I have attempted, however, to present these women as complicated, whole, and fully human, although the physical and psychological costs exacted by slavery were inhumane.

Since coining and defining the term “medical superbody,” I have wrestled with its use because it is a fraught denominator.‘ Other than the problematic descriptor “degraded,” which was broadly used to label disempowered women, no historic label from the antebellum era encapsulates the complexities and contradictions that were part and parcel of enslaved women’s socio- medical experiences. Consequently, my use of medical superbody is intentionally messy, ambiguous, and contentious because black women’s entrance into gynecology proved complex for white doctors, who viewed them through an optical microscope, using only two lenses, simplicity and complication. How could these women be both healthy and sick, strong yet rendered weak by the treatments and surgeries they endured? And ultimately, why were black bodies, which contained conflicting messages about their physical prowess and intellectual inferiority, positioned as the exemplars for pioneering gynecological surgical work that was to ultimately restore allegedly biologically superior white women to perfect health?

One of the more important functions of the “black” objectified medical superbody for white doctors was that black women were used not solely for healing and research but largely for the benefit of white women’s reproductive health. They represented “the medicalization of life,” whereby peculiar female diseases and even normal female biological functions were “problematized” and placed under the “advice procedures” of male experts who brought competencies within the orbit of an increasingly industrialized doctor-client relationship.’ It was a space where the medical superbody was the “epitome of consumerism” and pedagogy.* “She” became “it,” even in an arena like medicine, where patients were supposed to be treated as subjects, not objects. Medical Bondage is ultimately a historical telling of the impact of this medical scrutiny on the lives of enslaved women and poor immigrant women; it is also the story of the white medical men who fixated their gaze on these two groups.

Slave hospitals were the premier site for creating theories about black women’s exceptionality, and medical journals were the ideal medium for describing what transpired in these hospitals and articulating the resultant notions. In their pages, doctors presented and defined black women as “the other.” Medical journals allowed for the medicalization of black and Irish women that was critical to the racialization project and process.

Medical journals also described the “rival geographies” that existed between patients and early gynecologists.’ In these spaces of respite—their homes, the woods, underground dwellings such as caves—slaves would use the time to heal themselves outside the surveillance of local whites and their owners. Slaves were almost always engaged in secretive activities, a necessity given the omnipresence of owners. Despite the furtiveness of slaves to “steal away,” white doctors still had overwhelming access to black people’s bodies and engaged in experimental gynecological work. White medical men moved black patients’ bodies and body parts across a terrain that only they controlled. Historian Stephanie Camp has argued that “geographies of containment” were spaces where slaveholders put the idea of restraint into praxis. The slave hospital in this study is an exemplar of this kind of corporeal geographic containment. Hospitals were the backdrops for physicians’ medical writings that offered laypersons and professionals alike foundational texts that explained, usually in explicit and carefully crafted language, how to treat and think about black and white women patients who shared the same diseases. Medical journals were critical sites “where race was daily given shape.” These texts offered readers allegedly value-neutral explanations about black biological difference and disease. For example, women of African descent were believed to have elongated labia and low-hanging breasts and to be more lascivious than white women."

Case narratives, the written descriptions of patient histories and exchanges with doctors, appeared in medical journal articles and chronicled the multifarious ways that black women experienced both antebellum professional medical care and racism. These sources are as important as plantation records, ledgers, and interviews in what they reveal about doctors’ objectifying attitudes toward slaves and poor immigrants. Medical journals constitute the bulk of my source material. American doctors, especially pioneering southern ones who helped to create gynecology, saw themselves involved in a field that was becoming increasingly elite and professionalized and in some ways beginning to outpace European physicians’ medical research in sexual surgery. Southern doctors believed “their medicine was inseparable from their need to pronounce it.” Contained within these doctors’ writings are glimpses of slave life that are only beginning to gain recognition within the recent historiography of U.S. slavery. Southern slave owners and medical doctors relied on these publications to manage their slaves. Slave management journals devoted the bulk of their pages to the medical care of enslaved people, especially women. Masters, mistresses, and overseers let physicians’ published articles serve as guides for their treatment of bondwomen who were pregnant, had given birth, or suffered from gynecological ailments. Even as black women were sexually exploited and suffered from physical and psychological scars, often inflicted by the men who owned them, the maintenance of enslaved women’s bodies was still considered a priority. White southerners knew black women literally carried the race and extended the existence of slavery in their wombs.

Medical Bondage attempts to repair the gaping fistula in the historiographies of slavery and medicine, just as nineteenth-century doctors did for their patients. However, in my effort to suture these historiographic holes, I humanize the experiences of the women who were both objects and subjects. The task is a difficult one because archives do not lend themselves to exploring and capturing the wholeness of enslaved people’s lives. The study of U.S. slavery has changed greatly since early historian U. B. Phillips first wrote a pro-southern and Confederate-sympathizing history that praised slave owners for their benevolent treatment of their slaves. Since 1985, when Deborah Gray White and Jacqueline Jones inserted women into our discussions of U.S. slavery, historians have spent the next three decades examining enslaved women’s labor, both productive and reproductive, and how the group resisted and negotiated their bondage. Since the late 1990s, a small number of scholars have investigated the impact of medicine (both professional and folk), healing, childbirth, and motherhood on enslaved women’s lives.” Medical Bondage joins a small but growing cohort of scholarship that interweaves the histories of slavery and medicine to investigate how each system affected the other. Further, this book elucidates how reproduction made the experience of enslaved black women markedly different from that of enslaved men’s. Enslaved women had more frequent contact with doctors and, due to gynecological problems, were placed in hospitals more often than enslaved men. They were the objects of study and fascination among white physicians.