Medical Bondage and the Birth of American Gynecology

Abstract: In her prize-winning book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (2017), Cooper Owens explores how experimental surgeries on enslaved and working-poor women created the specialty of American gynecology.  She shows how these experiments also shaped nineteenth-century Americans’ understanding of race.  Merging women’s medical and social history, Cooper Owens pivots away from a near exclusive focus on white men to look instead at Black and Irish women's lives—as well as their bodies—to offer a new origins story for American medicine.

Sponsored by CMU's Department of History, Center for African-American Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE),  Dietrich College Grand Challenge Seminar Initiative, and the University Lecture Series