Bodies of Work: A Meditation on Medical Imaginaries and Enslaved Women

Abstract

The 19th-century surgical theaters in which American gynecological science was perfected were sites animated by multiple forms—and myriad conceptions—of labor. While newly professionalized white medical men celebrated the work of their own hands in speeches and in published articles, the lives and work of enslaved women in these early clinical spaces were alternately effaced and re-imagined in support of dominant narratives of medical progress. Black women’s injuries, their suffering, their instances of endurance, and, indeed, their very bodies were made to testify to the prowess of their examining physicians. The black female test subjects who comprised the first cohorts subjected to the emergent gynecological technologies of the mid-19th-century labored under the condition of enslavement. Their value in the discursive and syntagmatic spaces of the case reports written about them during the latter decades of the century was, therefore, wrought through with the political economy of chattel slavery. This essay argues that the early clinical spaces created by the American medical men heralded as the founding fathers of American gynecology—including James Marion Sims and his colleague Nathan Bozeman—mark critical locations mapping slavery’s circuits of value production. Further, it troubles prevailing historiography of slavery and medicine by considering the repetitive representations of black women’s bodies as part of the reproductive work that they were called to do.