Medical Bondage
Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology

This book was interesting and informative but repetitive. It seems it would have made a better paper than full book. As a full book, it could have been enriched by more connections to contemporary health. The author does a little of this in talking about her personal experience with fertility treatm......more

This book is an extraordinary statement on how the personal is always political, as enslaved black woman are finally given their rightful place in history as the mothers of American gynaecology!......more

I am a Registered Nurse with 25 years of experience. Sadly, I have witnessed some of the atrocities inflicted upon black / brown women during the Antebellum Era during the course of my career. I enjoyed this book for the knowledge and truths told. It broke my heart though, to see that very little ha......more

I finally finished reading this brilliantly-researched and brilliantly-written book. It took me so long because it does not flinch from telling painful truths about just how terribly black women were treated as patients during the birth of gynecology in the nineteenth century. However, it also empha......more

Medical Bondage is primarily a history of gender and medicine but its implications flow out and touch everything we thought we knew about American history. In under two hundred pages, Deirdre Cooper Owens asks us to reconsider historical approaches to and traditional understandings of medicine, slav......more