“Medical Bondage and the Birth of Gynecology”
Free and open to the public

Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals.

She retells the story of the rise of modern gynecology from the perspectives of black enslaved women and Irish immigrant women.