Professor Deirdre Cooper Owens discusses her book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology, which traces the origins of American reproductive health to slave hospitals. As white doctors expanded their practices onto plantations, quickly pregnancy and birth became the focus of their practices. Dr. James Marion Sims with other nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on enslaved women. While revolutionizing medical care, these doctors experimented and tortured enslaved women while creating groundless medical theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities.

Deirdre Cooper Owens is a Professor of History at University of Connecticut.