"They Brought Their Sufferings": Courageous Negro Servitors and Their Roles in the Birth of American Gynecology

Marginalized bodies have often been treated as pathological ones by physicians and historians. This paper will broaden current understandings of the role of enslaved women as medical subjects in groundbreaking nineteenth-century gynecologic surgeries.  Further, it will explore the importance of black female bodies to the construction of modern American gynecology.  Doctors’ access to these women’s bodies allowed for the rapid growth of the field and its concomitant medical technologies.  Although medical men held these women in disregard because they were viewed as degraded specimens, they also realized the vital importance of black women’s so-called physically superior bodies for surgeries. As such, enslaved women’s bodies were rendered into “medical superbodies.”  Their bodies and lives contained contradictions, complexities, and served as the original text for how the meta-narrative of black women would dictate how “black people,” especially women would be medically and physically treated. For example, white physicians believed these women experienced painless childbirth compared to their “white” counterparts, were physically stronger, and had different “natures.” Understanding these views, it is revealing that the retellings of nineteenth-century era histories of American medicine often exclude any serious discussion of the offerings that bondwomen made through the contributions of their bodies and their subsequent knowledge(s) of healing.  I assert that enslaved women were as vital to the growth of American modern gynecology as their physicians.