Medical Bondage and the Birth of American Gynecology

The 13th Annual Margaret Morrison Distinguished Lecture in Women’s History: "Medical Bondage and the Birth of American Gynecology," a lecture by Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens
In her prize-winning book, Medical Bondage, 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.
More info:
www.cmu.edu/di...