A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
The deprivations and cruelty of slavery have overshadowed our understanding of the institution's most human dimension: birth. We often don't realize that after the United States stopped importing slaves in 1808, births were more important than ever; slavery and the southern way of life could continue only through babies born in bondage.
In the antebellum South, slaveholders' interest in slave women was matched by physicians struggling to assert their own professional authority over childbirth, and the two began to work together to increase the number of infants born in the slave quarter. In unprecedented ways, doctors tried to manage the health of enslaved women from puberty through the reproductive years, attempting to foster pregnancy, cure infertility, and resolve gynecological problems, including cancer.
Black women, however, proved an unruly force, distrustful of both the slaveholders and their doctors. With their own healing traditions, emphasizing the power of roots and herbs and the critical roles of family and community, enslaved women struggled to take charge of their own health in a system that did not respect their social circumstances, customs, or values. Birthing a Slave depicts the competing approaches to reproductive health that evolved on plantations, as both black women and white men sought to enhance the health of enslaved mothers--in very different ways and for entirely different reasons.
Birthing a Slave is the first book to focus exclusively on the health care of enslaved women, and it argues convincingly for the critical role of reproductive medicine in the slave system of antebellum America.
At last, here is a user-friendly guide to gynecologic surgery. The authors' guiding principle is that each woman for whom any kind of surgery is recommended should be well informed about the indications, the risks, and the expected results.
Using anecdotes drawn from a combined fifty years of experience, doctors Moore and de Costa provide clear and accurate information about women's anatomy, physiology, common gynecological ailments, diagnosis, alternative treatments, and, finally, full details about surgery itself. Among the surgeries discussed are removal of the uterus (hysterectomy), removal of the ovaries (oophorectomy), and removal of fibroids. The various ways of performing these procedures are examined, including minimally invasive surgery done through the laparoscope.
The authors also help the patient through the post-operative phase, revealing what to expect, how to make the recovery easier, and how to take care of yourself after the surgery. The result is a book that empowers women as they weigh their options with regard to gynecologic surgery.
Using patient records and archival material from the female governors and administrators at the hospital, From Midwives to Medicine shows how a new medical practice developed out of the changing patterns and historical experiences of childbirth, as well as out of the context of the social relations f the sexes. Sim's patients were slave women in the antebellum South, poor Irish immigrants in the industrial North, and upper-class white. Protestant, Manhattan socialites who sought help for their "hysterical" symptoms. During his career, which began in the South and flourished at the Women's Hospital in New York. Sims performed and perfected his technique to "cure" vesico-vaginal fistulas, the tears of childbirth, from which so many women suffered. But Sims achieved these successes on the operating table only after years of practicing his "silver suture" technique on unanesthetized slave women, who he believed "by the nature of their race... had a specific physiological tolerance for pain unknown to whites."
Responding to the growing need for tried-and-trusted solutions to the reproductive health care issues confronting millions of women worldwide, Obstetrics and Gynecology in Low-Resource Settings provides practical guidelines for ensuring the delivery of quality OB/GYN care to women in resource-poor countries. Including contributions from leading clinicians and researchers in the field, this welcome overview fills an important gap in existing medical literature on women’s health care and will be an invaluable resource for doctors, clinicians, and medical students at all stages of their careers who work in the global health arena.
The reproductive health risks that all women face are greatly exacerbated when health care facilities are inadequate, equipment and medications are in short supply, and well-trained medical staff are few and far away. Often in these settings, the sole doctor or medical professional on hand has expertise in some areas of women’s reproductive care but needs a refresher course in others.
This informative guide features hands-on, step-by-step instruction for the most pertinent OB/GYN conditions—both acute and chronic—that health care workers in the field confront. The authors examine a wide range of topics, including: strategies to reduce maternal mortality and stillbirths; infectious and sexually transmitted diseases, including malaria and HIV; cervical cancer; contraception; prenatal, delivery, and newborn care; and complications arising from gender-based violence and female genital cutting. Published in a convenient format with a durable binding, this reference will be an essential companion to health care providers throughout the world.
From J. Marion Sims’s surgical experiments on unanesthetized slave women in the mid-nineteenth century, to the use of cadavers and prostitutes to teach medical students gynecological techniques, Kapsalis focuses on the ways in which women and their bodies have been treated by the medical establishment. Removing gynecology from its private cover within clinic walls and medical textbook pages, she decodes the gynecological exam, seizing on its performative dimension. She considers traditional medical practices and the dynamics of "proper" patient performance; non-traditional practices such as cervical self-exam; and incarnations of the pelvic examination outside the bounds of medicine, including its appearance in David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers and Annie Sprinkle’s performance piece "Public Cervix Announcement."
Confounding the boundaries that separate medicine, art, and pornography, revealing the potent cultural attitudes and anxieties about women, female bodies, and female sexuality that permeate the practice of gynecology, Public Privates concludes by locating a venue from which challenging, alternative performances may be staged.
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