NOTES
INTRODUCTION
AMERICAN GYNECOLOGY AND BLACK LIVES
1. Ivy, “Bodies of Work.”
2. See Downs’s Sick from Freedom and Samuel K. Roberts’s Infectious Fear.
3. The non-Western humoral system was the Indian Ayurvedic one. The humoral system consisted of black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. It was widely accepted until the nineteenth century.
4. Willoughby, “Pedagogies of the Black Body,” 4.
5. See Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, 58. Hartman investigates racial domination during slavery and how black people used terror and resistance to create identities.
6. My coining of the term “medical superbody” is inspired by Michele Wallace’s black feminist book, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. The book examines the role of black women and their low status in American society.
7. O’Neill, Five Bodies, 123.
8. Ibid., 132.
9. Camp, Closer to Freedom, 8.
10. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul, 136.
11. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies.”
12. Stowe, Doctoring the South, 3.
13. See the work of historians such as the late Marli Weiner, Sharla Fett, Marie Jenkins Schwartz, and V. Lynn Kennedy for more information on the growing body of literature that focuses on slavery and histories of medicine.
14. Some of the secondary sources on Irish immigrant women were largely derived from Kuhn McGregor’s From Midwives to Medicine.
15. See Bliss, Blockley Days; Dosite Postell, Health of Slaves on Southern Plantations; Emmet, Reminiscences of the Founders; Meigs, Females and Their Diseases; and Sims, Story of My Life.
16. Taylor, “Women in the Documents.”
17. See Breeden, Advice among Masters.
18. Ibid., 164.
19. See Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed. This text positions love as a category of analysis, and I assert that a major component of the methodology of the oppressed born out of enslaved women’s struggles is centered on the politicization of love.
20. Philips, American Negro Slavery.
21. Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 380.
22. Schroeder, Slave to the Body, 107.
23. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110.
CHAPTER 1
THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN GYNECOLOGY
1. See Beverly, History and Present State.
2. Minges, Far More Terrible for Women, 183.
3. Ibid., 182.
4. Yetman, Voices from Slavery, 262.
5. See chap. 6, “The Masculine Birth of Gynaecology,” in Monica H. Green’s book Making Women’s Medicine Masculine for a well-documented history of male midwifery and the rise of masculine authority in women’s medicine during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially in Italy.
6. Walzer Leavitt, Women and Health in America, 149.
7. See Breeden’s Advice among Masters.
8. Ebert, “Rise and Development,” 243.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 247.
11. Ibid., 260.
12. Sims, Story of My Life, 116.
13. Stephen Kenny, “Development of Medical Museums,” 12.
14. Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind, vii.
15. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul, 136.
16. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies.”
17. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.”
18. Eve and Meigs, “Article XII.”
19. Pernick, Calculus of Suffering, 137.
20. Ibid.
21. Eve and Meigs, “Article XII,” 395. Charles Meigs was one of America’s most eminent medical doctors and professors of gynecology and obstetrics.
22. Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 160.
23. As early as the fourteenth century, adventurous European men had compiled popular travel narratives, such as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, to introduce and discuss the differences of the people they allegedly encountered on their travels to Asia, Africa, and later the Americas. The author of this narrative expressed surprise at how comfortable black women were in displaying their nude bodies in front of both men and women. “Ethiopian [women],” he wrote, “have no shame of the men.” See Morgan, Laboring Women, 16. “Bio-racism” is a more precise appellation for nineteenth-century racial theories than the more usual term “scientific racism.”
24. Wood, Origins of American Slavery, 25.
25. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia.
26. Ibid.
27. Contemporary scholars have termed this study of “science” pseudoscientific racism.
28. Gould, Mismeasure of Man.
29. Redpath, Roving Editor, 141.
30. Kuhn McGregor, From Midwives to Medicine, 111.
31. Brunton, Women’s Health and Medicine, 51– 52.
32. Caton, What a Blessing, 26.
33. See Breslaw’s Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic for a discussion of the static nature of American medicine during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
34. Rutkow, “Medical Education.”
35. Waring, History of Medicine, 169.
36. All these surgeons began their work with both enslaved and white patient populations. Decades after this cohort of men transformed reproductive medicine, their colleagues termed them the “fathers” of various branches of American medicine.
37. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery, 293– 97.
38. John Spurlock, “Vesicovaginal Fistula,” Medscape, March 1, 2016, http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/267943-overview, accessed October 11, 2016.
39. Sims, Story of My Life, 241.
40. Wright, “On the Prussiate of Iron,” 282– 83.
41. Ibid., 282– 83.
42. Ibid., 283. It is highly unlikely that the enslaved woman lost six pounds of blood. If she did in such a short period of time, the bondwoman would have gone into shock and died, because the human body contains only approximately six quarts, or twelve pounds, of blood. Wright must have miscalculated this amount.
43. Ibid.
44. Breslaw, Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic, 131.
45. Wright, “On the Prussiate of Iron,” 280. While Dr. Wright did not state the race of the midwife, I believe she was white for several reasons, but mainly because she had access to prussiate of iron.
46. Ibid., 281. Prussian blue is the common name for prussiate of iron, because of its intense blue color. It is produced when ferrous ferrocyanide salts oxidize.
47. Ibid.
48. Weiner and Hough, Sex, Sickness, and Slavery, 43.
49. Archer, “Facts Illustrating a Disease,” 319. The article does not provide information on the manner in which the women’s labia were fused together. Dr. Archer’s assertion that unsanitary conditions created the fusion of slave women’s labia is misinformed. The numerous studies that contemporary scholars and researchers have authored about African retention practices and female genital mutilation provide a more accurate explanation of the origins of the bondwomen’s condition. See Gomez’s Exchanging Our Country Marks for a historical understanding of this kind of rite-of-passage practice.
50. Archer, “Facts Illustrating a Disease,” 319.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Schachner, Ephraim McDowell, 131.
54. Young Ridenbaugh, Biography of Ephraim McDowell, 88.
55. Ibid., 88.
56. Nystrom, “Everyday Life in Danville.” At the time 432 people lived in Danville, and most of those residents were white.
57. Johnston, Sketch of Dr. John Peter Mettauer, 9.
58. Mettauer, “On Vesico-Vaginal Fistula,” 120.
59. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 85.
60. Sims, Story of My Life, 116.
61. Ibid., 32.
62. The seven articles that James Marion Sims published are listed in the order of their publication: “Double Congenital Harelip—Absence of the Superior Incisors, and Their Portion of Alveolar Process” (1844); “On the Extraction of Foreign Bodies from the Meatus Auditorius Externus” (1845); “Trismus Nascentium, Its Pathology and Treatment” (1846); “Removal of the Superior Maxilla for a Tumor of the Antrum. Apparent Cure. Return of the Disease. Second Operation. Sequel” (1847); “Osteo-Sarcoma of the Lower Jaw. Removal of the Body of the Bone without External Mutilation” (1847); “Further Observations of Trismus Nascentium, with Cases Illustrating Its Etiology and Treatment” (1848); and “On the Treatment of Vesico-Vaginal Fistula” (1852).
63. Sims, Story of My Life, 231.
64. Ibid., 227.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., 236.
67. Sims, Silver Sutures in Surgery, 52.
68. Ewell, Medical Companion or Family Physician, 46.
69. Dosite Postell, Health of Slaves, 138.
70. Douglass, “Brief Essay,” 218.
71. Sims, Story of My Life, 237.
72. See Barker-Benfield, Horrors of the Half-Known Life.
73. Federal Census, Montgomery Ward, Montgomery, Alabama, December 5, 1850.
74. “Announcements.”
75. See Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid. Washington argues that pioneering doctors like James Marion Sims were intentionally racist and cruel in their treatment of enslaved women. While most white southern doctors who worked on black patients undoubtedly believed in their inferiority, it worked against the economic interests of slavery to willfully maim and murder black patients. All nineteenth-century medicine was experimental and exceedingly dangerous. Black women formed a more vulnerable patient population, as Washington argues, but the archival evidence does not point to white medical men behaving sadistically to devalue the medical lives of black women who kept slavery alive through their reproductive capabilities.
76. Rosenberg, Care of Strangers, 89.
77. Medical notes dated March 1853, William Darrach and George M. Darrach Papers, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md. Miss Manus may have informed the doctor that she was pregnant to gain medical treatment, especially if she was afraid of dying and leaving her children. Dropsy is a condition that causes severe swelling either in the body’s cavities or in tissues.
CHAPTER 2
BLACK WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES IN SLAVERY AND MEDICINE
1. White men largely staffed the Works Progress Administration (WPA), developed by New Deal president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Geneva Tonsill represented the small percentage of African American women who interviewed the formerly enslaved under the auspices of the WPA. Her presence was exceptional. Much has been written about how formerly enslaved men and women might have kowtowed to the often racially condescending treatment of white interviewers. Although scholars will never know the full extent of Julia Brown’s honesty in responding to Geneva Tonsill’s questions, we can reasonably guess that Brown might have felt a familiarity and community-linked kinship with an African American woman interviewer who was also living in a virulently racist Jim Crow America.
2. Yetman, Voices from Slavery, 48, and “Ex-Slave Interviews,” 182.
3. Arkansas Narratives, 231.
4. Athey v. Olive, 34 Alabama 711 (1859), http://www.lib.auburn.edu/archive/aghy/slaves.htm, accessed March 25, 2015.
5. Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 40.
6. Fett, Working Cures, 20.
7. Hurmence, We Lived, 100.
8. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life, 13.
9. Clayton, Mother Wit, 48.
10. Letter from William Lincrieux to Huger, July 3, 1847, Cleland Kinloch Huger Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.
11. Apter, “Blood of Mothers.”
12. Ibid.
13. Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 160.
14. Archer, “Facts Illustrating a Disease,” 320.
15. Ibid.
16. Bellinger, “Art. I.,” 241– 42.
17. Ibid., 242.
18. Ibid., 243.
19. Stephen N. Harris, “Case of Ovarian Pregnancy,” 371– 72.
20. Ibid., 372.
21. Ibid., 372. Contemporary physicians do not consider the use of iodide of potassium life threatening, although the risk for the developing goiters in utero for fetuses is increased. It is a pharmaceutical that iodizes salt and also aids in the treatment of thyroids.
22. Stephen N. Harris, “Case of Ovarian Pregnancy,” 371– 72.
23. Ibid., 372.
24. Tidyman, “Sketch,” 337.
25. Weyers, Abuse of Man, 43.
26. Ibid.
27. Account Book, 1826, Frame 00154, John Peter Mettauer Papers, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. Generally, white doctors charged twenty dollars for childbirth deliveries. The account book records kept by Joseph Mettauer document this fact. Mettauer visited “a negro woman in labour” at William Hynes’s slave farm in November 1826 and was compensated this amount.
28. Redhibition is “the annulment of the sale of an article, etc., and its return to the vendor at the instigation of the buyer; (also) a civil action to compel a vendor to take back goods sold on the grounds of some defect.” It is akin to contemporary “lemon laws.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2016 online ed., s.v. “redhibition.”
29. Tunnicliff Catterall, Judicial Cases concerning American Slavery, 2:320.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 2:321.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 2:331.
34. Pendelton, “Comparative Fecundity.”
35. See Nell Irvin Painter’s Soul Murder and Slavery. Painter defines “soul murder” as the system of brutality that affected the enslaved, especially children, who were sexually, emotionally, and physically abused by their owners. Drawing on psychiatry, Painter says that victims of “soul murder” quelled their emotions. She argues that soul murder was a regular feature of antebellum slavery, which was founded on severe violence.
36. Yetman, Voices from Slavery, 133.
37. Wyant Howell, I Was a Slave, 24– 25.
38. Ibid., 25.
39. Williams, Weren’t No Good Times, 78.
40. See Sharla Fett’s Working Cures.
41. Yetman, Voices from Slavery, 47.
42. Eve and Meigs, “Article XII,” 398.
43. Refers to Sharla Fett’s 2002 book, Working Cures.
44. Yetman, Voices from Slavery, 230.
45. Dosite Postell, Health of Slaves, 118.
46. Tunnicliff Catterall, Judicial Cases concerning American Slavery, 2:672.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid. Most notably, the court case mentions that the enslaved woman had no “delay and reluctance” in reporting her condition to her new owner, although her admission came on the fifteenth or twentieth of the month, a full twelve to seventeen days after he had acquired her.
49. Breslaw, Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic, 117.
50. The term “cachexia Africana” was coined by Samuel Cartwright, a founding member of the racist American school of ethnology. He first used the term in “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race” in DeBow’s Review.
51. Harrison, “Cases in Midwifery,” 369
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 369.
54. These two journals were used because they were the only two, as far as the research has revealed, that spanned over a twenty-year period, 1830– 50. Nearly all nineteenth-century medical journals had very short publication lives.
55. The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal later became the New England Journal of Medicine, which is still in publication today.
56. If this enslaved woman was born in 1747, before the international slave trade ended, she quite possibly was born in West Africa. If so, she had more than likely participated in a female induction ceremony marking her transition from girlhood to womanhood. Though one can only speculate, she probably had a clitoridectomy performed on her while she was a young girl. After she was sold into slavery in America, the elderly enslaved woman had been removed from a distinct ethnic culture and society of women who could have at least offered her specific information on how to care for her body post-clitoridectomy and at the least, provide some methods, if they existed, of relieving her vaginal pain. To have her vagina mutilated as a young person and then to have a white male doctor manually examine her disfigured vagina with only his fingers must have been an unsettling emotional experience for the woman.
57. Bellinger, “Art. I,” 248.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Copy of the Appraisement of the Personal Estate of Dr. James Spann, February 10, 1838, James Spann Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.
61. See the third chapter of Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I A Woman?, 91– 118. This chapter provides a detailed discussion of the evolution of female slaves’ lives from childhood through their elderly years. Gray White also details the importance of reproduction and motherhood in these women’s lives.
62. Harrison, “Cases in Midwifery,” 367.
63. Ibid., 368.
64. Rawick, American Slave, 128.
65. Morris, Culture of Pain, 2.
66. Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 42.
67. See Yetman, Voices from Slavery.
68. July was the birth month of three of the interviewees, or 11.11 percent of the total number.
69. There is a rich historiography on childbearing and enslaved women. See, for example, Cheryll Ann Cody’s important article “Cycles of Work and of Childbearing: Seasonality in Women’s Lives on Low Country Plantations.” Cody writes, “Slave women in nonsugar areas . . . bore children in greater numbers, contributing, as in the case of the United States, to population growth” (in Gaspar and Clark Hine, More Than Chattel, 61). The author further argues that by looking at “the seasonality of labor in the fields and the seasonality of childbearing,” scholars can assess how “annual cycles of crop production” were related to pregnancy and childbirth (62).
70. Gaillard, “Art. VII,” 499.
71. “List of Negroes, 1844– 1859,” in Plantation Books, Glover Family Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia. Also note that the literature on slave fertility helps to quantify the data on Glover Plantation slave births. As mentioned earlier, Cheryll Ann Cody’s work on one thousand South Carolina bondwomen shows the linkages between a rather healthy diet and labor patterns and fertility rates. See Menken, Trussel, and Watkins’s article “The Nutrition Fertility Link” for more information on the causative relationship between nutrition, labor, and fertility.
72. “List of Negroes, 1844– 1859,” Glover Family Papers.
73. “List of Negroes Sold, January 28, 1851,” in Plantation Book, Glover Family Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.
74. “List of Inferior Negroes at Richfield Plantation, Belonging to Joseph and Edward Glover, 1852,” in Plantation Book, Glover Family Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.
75. Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 380.
76. Ibid., 169.
77. Breeden, Advice among Masters, 169.
78. Woodman, Slavery and the Southern Economy, 89. For more information on the impact of intense labor during trimesters with resulting low birth weight, see Campbell, “Work, Pregnancy, and Infant Mortality.”
79. Craghead, “Remarkable Case of Double Pregnancy,” 114.
80. Breeden, Advice among Masters, 164.
81. Nordhoff, Freedmen of South-Carolina, 6
82. Hurmence, Before Freedom, 37.
83. Yetman, Voices from Slavery, 134.
84. Hurmence, Before Freedom, 79.
85. Medical Case Book (1860– 1862), series/collection MC51, folder 246, J. J. A. Smith Papers, University of Alabama Archives, University of Alabama at Birmingham.
86. Hurmence, Before Freedom, 40.
87. Perdue, Barden, and Phillips, Weevils in the Wheat, 142.
88. Ibid. For another discussion of enslaved fatherhood, see Edward Baptist’s “The Absent Subject.”
89. Former slave Mary Reynolds’s narrative, in American Slave Narratives.
90. Minges, Far More Terrible for Women, 26.
91. Alice Walker coined the term “womanism” in 1979 in her short story “Coming Apart.” She grounded that theory in feminism and also the specific oppressive cultural, gendered, and racial realities that black women faced in American society.
92. Minges, Far More Terrible for Women, 26.
93. For more information, see Darlene Clark Hines groundbreaking article on black women, rape, and dissemblance, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West.”
CHAPTER 3
CONTESTED RELATIONS: SLAVERY, SEX, AND MEDICINE
1. Bailey, “Art. XI.”
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Peixotto, Rhinelander, and Graves, New York Medical Journal, 141.
5. Felstein, Once a Slave, 132. The following passage explains the consequences that some young black girls faced for being raped. “The mistress beat the child and locked her up in a smokehouse. For two weeks the girl was constantly whipped. Some of the elderly servants attempted to plead with the mistress on Maria’s behalf, and even hinted that ‘it was mass’r that was to blame.’ The mistress’s reply was typical: ‘She’ll know better in the future. After I’ve done with her, she’ll never do the like again, through ignorance.’”
6. Bailey, “Art. XI.”
7. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life, 55.
8. Ibid., 52.
9. Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 380.
10. Harrison, “Cases in Midwifery,” 368.
11. Ibid.
12. George (a slave) v. State, 37 Miss 316, October 1859, p. 1249, Mississippi High Court of Errors and Appeals, Mississippi Supreme Court, Mississippi State Cases: Being Criminal Cases Decided in the High Court of Errors and Appeals, and in the Supreme Court of the State of Mississippi: from the June Term 1818 to the First Monday in January 1872, 1249.
13. See Melton, Celia, a Slave.
14. In Without Consent or Contract, Fogel writes extensively about the infant mortality rate of slave women in Trinidad and that of female slaves in the United States. Fogel states, “In high-risk societies, some 60 percent of all infant deaths occurred within the first month following birth, nearly half of these early deaths occurred within hours, or at most a few days, after birth” (147– 48). The period he references is circa 1830– 50. White infant mortality rates in the antebellum South are nearly as grim as those of enslaved blacks according to Richard H. Steckel. He states, “The slave infant mortality rate calculated from plantation records in 233 per thousand. Approximately 201 of every thousand children who survived to age 1 did not survive to age 5. Although it is recognized that slave and white mortality rates may have differed, these data suggest that a figure in the neighborhood of 40 percent is not unreasonable.” Steckel, “Antebellum Southern White Fertility,” 336.
15. Block, Rape and Sexual Power, 100.
16. Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 29– 31.
17. Sommerville, Rape and Race, 265.
18. Fett, Working Cures, 11.
19. Wragg, “Article II,” 146– 47.
20. Ibid., 147.
21. Flexner, Medical Education, 3.
22. Savitt, Race and Medicine. Chapters 7 and 8 are especially vital to understanding the use of blacks in experimental surgeries and trials.
23. Dosite Postell, Health of Slaves, 118.
24. Walter Johnson’s exhaustive study on the New Orleans antebellum slave markets, Soul by Soul, documents the medical examinations that slave women had to endure while being appraised by slave traders and merchants.
25. Finley, “Article V,” 263.
26. Ibid. This enslaved woman may have had breast cancer, fibrocystic breasts, or a gynecological infection caused by a sexually transmitted disease.
27. Ibid., 264. Although not common, the practice of asking colleagues for help in locating the source of disease for medical cases was not exceedingly rare.
28. Ibid.
29. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 235.
30. Wyant Howell, I Was a Slave, 28– 29.
31. Ibid., 29.
32. Hill Collins, Fighting Words, 80.
33. Minges, Far More Terrible for Women, 183.
34. Williams, Weren’t No Good Times, 111.
35. Hartman, Scenes of Subjugation, 81.
36. Camp, Closer to Freedom, 4.
37. Jordan, White over Black, 32.
38. Yetman, Voices from Slavery, 102– 3.
39. Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 187.
40. Williams, Weren’t No Good Times, 78.
41. Atkins, “Atkins on the Rupture.”
42. Brooks Higginbotham, “African American Women’s History,” 252.
43. Atkins, “Atkins on the Rupture,” 332.
44. Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 3.
45. See Savitt, “Use of Blacks.”
46. Perdue, Barden, and Phillips, Weevils in the Wheat, 142.
47. Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham provides this definition and also adds that this supplanting of race by metalanguage makes it difficult to comprehend black women’s lives and experiences.
48. Perdue, Barden, and Phillips, Weevils in the Wheat, 142.
49. Taylor, “Women in the Documents.”
50. Dusinberre, Them Dark Days, 246– 47.
51. Minges, Far More Terrible for Women, 153.
52. In the 1859 Louisiana judicial slave case of Underwood v. Lacapère, a slave owner sold a six-week-old boy along with his mother. The child had no listed value, and the bondwoman was undervalued at eight hundred dollars. The plaintiff indicated that the boy’s presence “really diminished the then value of the mother.” Taken from Helen Tunnicliff Catteral’s Judicial Cases concerning American Slavery, 670. The sale of young infants negatively affected the economic value of their mothers because slave owners considered these totally dependent slaves financial burdens. Babies required monetary investments by slave masters and could not contribute to their owners’ wealth until they were physically and mentally able to produce labor.
53. Minges, Far More Terrible for Women, 152– 53.
54. Berlin, Favreau, and Miller, Remembering Slavery, 133.
55. Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 193.
56. The theory of polygenism posits that human beings originated in different locations and are distinct in their biological and “racial” composition. Louis Agassiz was one of the earliest proponents of polygenism and wrote prolifically about the subject. He was one of the major proponents of the scientific racism that evolved in the nineteenth century.
57. The American school was developed by American physicians, ethnologists, and natural historians who claimed not only that races were distinct from one another but also that people of African descent were inherently inferior to those of European descent. The proponents of this biologically based racial science relied on craniometry and skeleton studies and the analysis of facial angles to determine how close black people were to apes.
CHAPTER 4
IRISH IMMIGRANT WOMEN AND AMERICAN GYNECOLOGY
1. “Destitute Emigrants.”
2. Natalie Leger’s comments from a September 19, 2015, writing group meeting, Brooklyn, New York. Also see Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White and Hasia Diner’s Erin’s Daughters in America. For a discussion of the “othering” of the Irish by the English, see Audrey Horning’s Ireland in the Virginian Sea.
3. Hassard, Life of the Most Reverend John Hughes, 309.
4. Ibid.
5. Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 195– 240.
6. “The Missing Link,” Punch, October 18, 1862, 165.
7. Maguire, Irish in America, 181.
8. Ibid., 340.
9. Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion, 58.
10. Richardson, History of the Sisters of Charity Hospital, 2.
11. See chapter 2 of Maureen Fitzgerald’s Habits of Compassion, esp. 73– 76, for more detailed insight into the work of the House of the Good Shepherd and the contributions it made to the lives of Irish-born sex workers.
12. Ibid., 74.
13. Sanger, History of Prostitution, 594. In 1857, Blackwell Island burned, and Sanger’s completed manuscript and personal library were lost to the fire. He had an original draft of his work that was finished in 1856, and he used this date to mark the completion of his writing and research although it was published years later.
14. Ibid., 594.
15. Charles E. Rosenberg, introduction, “Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History,” in Rosenberg and Golden, Framing Disease, xiv.
16. Sims, Story of My Life, 269. Although promoted as the country’s first medical institution devoted solely to the treatment of gynecological diseases and ailments, Sims’s Alabama slave hospital, in operation from 1845 to 1849, was the country’s first women’s hospital.
17. McCauley, Who Shall Take Care of Our Sick?, 3.
18. The appellation “Erin’s Daughters” is derived from the Irish word for Ireland. Nineteenth-century poets and nationalists used it romantically to refer to Irish females. “Hibernia” was also a moniker for Irish women. See Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America.
19. Rosenberg, Care of Strangers, 42.
20. Kuhn McGregor, From Midwives to Medicine, 105.
21. Ibid., 109.
22. Thomas Addis Emmet, although born in Virginia, was reared in New York. He did express sympathies with the South during the Civil War. Thus like some northerners because of either familial ties or cultural connections, he had a certain fondness for the South. Further, as a member of a famous Irish nationalist family, Emmet might not have discriminated against Mary Smith because of her Irish ancestry, but he was initially repulsed by her impoverished condition.
23. There is some speculation that James Marion Sims’s southern sympathies, along with his practice of tightly packing medical theaters with onlookers, led to his being forced to leave the hospital he had founded right before the start of the Civil War.
24. Emmet, Reminiscences of the Founders, 5.
25. Kevin Kenny, American Irish, 107.
26. Gerber, Making of an American Pluralism, 130.
27. Niles, “Miscellaneous.”
28. Takaki, Iron Cages, 116.
29. Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex, 9.
30. Kevin Kenny, American Irish, 63.
31. Information on the history of the House of Industry in South Boston can be accessed at the Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Mass. The electronic library record is available at http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/wes/indexes/alpha/content/1001955798.html, accessed December 21, 2007.
32. Jackson, “Malformation,” 394.
33. Dexter, “Singular Case of Hiccough,” 195.
34. Ibid., 196.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 197.
38. Ibid.
39. Rosenberg, Framing Diseases, xvi.
40. Löwy, “Historiography of Biomedicine.”
41. Meigs, Lecture, 5.
42. Kraut, Silent Travelers, 41.
43. Burnwell, “Article IV,” 323.
44. Ibid.
45. Thomas, History of Nine Cases, 11.
46. Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion, 83.
47. Elliot, “Induction of Premature Labor,” 331.
48. Fordos, “On the Employment,” 206.
49. Elliot, “Induction of Premature Labor,” 333.
50. Ibid.
51. Gliddon and Nott, “Types of Mankind.”
52. Churchill, “Observations on the Diseases.”
53. Thomas, History of Nine Cases, 5.
54. Ibid., 6.
55. Gegan, “Case of Spontaneous Rupture,” 360.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., 361.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 362.
62. Agnew, “Vesico-Vaginal Fistula,” 572.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. According to the Saint Joseph Hospital’s website, “in 1849, Ireland was experiencing a devastating famine, which sent people fleeing to the United States. For Irish immigrants who settled in Philadelphia, medical attention was desperately needed. To answer the growing medical needs of these immigrants, a substantial three-story home at the corner of Sixteenth Street and Girard Avenue was purchased. This dwelling would soon come to be known as Saint Joseph’s Hospital, the oldest Catholic hospital in the city of Philadelphia.” http://www.nphs.com/stjo_info.html.
67. Agnew, “Vesico-Vaginal Fistula,” 572.
68. Irish women’s bodies and facial features were drawn to resemble apes throughout the century. For a more critical discussion of the history of the simianization of the Irish, see Curtis, Apes and Angels and Anglo-Saxons and Celts. Roy Porter also writes about simianization and anti-Irish racism in his book Paddy and Mr. Punch. The names “Paddy” and “Mr. Punch” refer to the stereotypical and also animal-like representations of the Irish that were found in British humor periodicals and literature. See also Laura Briggs’s “The Race of Hysteria.”
69. Briggs, “Race of Hysteria,” 262.
70. MS B 324, William Darrach and George M. Darrach Papers, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, U.S. National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md.
71. Warner, Popular Treatise, 109.
CHAPTER 5
HISTORICAL BLACK SUPERBODIES AND THE MEDICAL GAZE
1. Sims, Story of My Life, 470– 71.
2. Morrison, Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power, xi.
3. Curran, Anatomy of Blackness, 223– 24.
4. Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815– 17,” in Wallace-Sanders, Skin Deep, Spirit Strong, 72.
5. Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 135.
6. Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 17.
7. Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History,” 252.
8. Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 156.
9. Breeden, Advice among Masters, 164.
10. Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities.”
11. Sims, Story of My Life, 228– 29.
12. Ibid., 230.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 238.
15. Curran, Anatomy of Blackness, 224.
16. Sims, Story of My Life, 242.
17. Curtis, Apes and Angels, 12.
18. Ibid., 13.
19. Jordan, White over Black, 238.
20. Walzer Leavitt, Women and Health in America, 13.
21. Ibid., 12.
22. Meigs, Females and Their Diseases, 46– 47.
23. Nell Irvin Painter notes the importance of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach as “The Father of Anthropology” and as “a Founding Father of racial science and the classification of races.” More information about the relevance of Blumenbach’s work within racial science can be found in Irvin Painter’s unpublished essay, “Why Are White People Called ‘Caucasian’?”
24. Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 163.
25. Ibid.
26. Gallaher, “Case of Rupture,” 291.
27. Code of Ethics, 5.
28. Ibid., 7 and 9.
29. Archer, “Facts Illustrating a Disease,” 323.
30. Stephanie M. H. Camp, “The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830– 1861,” in Baptist and Camp, New Studies in the History, 93. Camp defines the “outlawed body” as a “site of pleasure and resistance” for an enslaved person. Further, she sees the outlawed body as a “third body . . . and a political site.”
31. Archer, “Facts Illustrating a Disease,” 323.
32. For further information on Archer, consult the biographical article by J. Alexis Shriver, “Dr. John Archer.”
33. Archer, “Facts Illustrating a Disease,” 323.
34. Wyant Howell, I Was a Slave, 15.
35. See Wyant Howell, I Was a Slave. Laura Clark, who was formerly held in bondage, responded in her WPA interview that her “mammy was de mother of twenty-two chillun,” while Lulu Wilson reported that she was her parents’ only child. Due to Wilson’s only-child status, her mother was forced to “marry” another man, and they produced “nineteen chillen.”
36. Wyant Howell, ”I Was a Slave,” 33.
37. Minges, Far More Terrible for Women, 22.
38. Ibid., 22.
39. Pernick, Calculus of Suffering, 156.
40. Wyant Howell, ”I Was a Slave,” 33.
41. Kemble, Journal of a Residence, 363– 64.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Heustis, “Case of Strangulated Umbilical Hernia,” 380.
46. Ibid., 381.
47. Noted American school physician and proslavery racist Samuel Cartwright gave a “scientific” explanation for black people’s biological defects as they related to Ham. Cartwright wrote, “The verb, from which his Hebrew name is derived, points out this flexed position of his knees, and also clearly expresses the servile type of his mind. Ham, the father of Canaan, . . . a black man was the father of the slave or knee-bending species of mankind. . . . The Negro, in all ages of the world, has carried with him a mark equally efficient . . . the mark of blackness.” Samuel Cartwright, “The Prognathous Species of Mankind,” in McKitrick, Slavery Defended, 143.
48. Harding, “Taking Responsibility,” 14.
49. Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 3.
50. Ibid., 3.
51. Hurston, “What White Publishers Won’t Print.”
52. Portions of this chapter appear in my chapter “Perfecting the Degraded Body: Slavery, Irish-Immigration, and American Gynaecology,” in Power in History: From Medieval Ireland to the Post-Modern World, ed. Anthony McElligott, Liam Chambers, Ciara Breathnach, and Catherine Lawless (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011).
AFTERWORD
1. Dr. Desiree McCarthy-Keith, an African American endocrinologist, has found that “11.5% of black women report infertility compared to 7% of white women . . . yet studies indicate that black women use infertility services less often.” Georgia Reproductive Specialists, “African American Women and Infertility: An Unmet Need,” PR Newswire, April 2, 2012, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/african-american-women-and-infertility-an-unmet-need-145776205.html.
2. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 65.