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9781478034438 Academic Inspection Copy

Materia Medica

Black Women, White Doctors, and Spectacular Gynecology
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In 1840, a young doctor named James Marion Sims established the surgery practice in Montgomery, Alabama at which he and his mentee, Nathan Bozeman, developed the field of gynecology through experimentation on black enslaved women. In Materia Medica, Nicole N. Ivy investigates how the bodies of the enslaved provided a physical terrain upon and through which white male fantasies of mastery, practice, and perfection could be played out. Through an interdisciplinary methodology that brings feminist historiography, critical race theory, visual culture studies, and literary studies to bear on the history of transatlantic slavery and medicine, Ivy places Sims's and Bozeman's clinic in the context of the flourishing antebellum slave market and demonstrates how black women were made to move as both currency and commodity through the circuit of medical knowledge production. Spanning nineteenth-century medical manuals to twenty-first-century creative works, Materia Medica ultimately considers what the memorials to Sims and the enslaved women he examined tells us about the challenges of representing difficult histories and reflects on artistic possibilities for historical reckoning.
Nicole N. Ivy is an American Studies scholar and teacher.
"This remarkable book traces the relationship between enslaved black women, the materiality of their unfree bodies, and the (white) medical advancements that bear the mark of their traumas. Ivy's meticulously researched archival retrieval will be paradigm shifting--vital for research in slavery studies, Black studies, gender studies, nineteenth century history, and visual culture studies."--Kimberly Juanita Brown, author of, Black Elegies: Meditations on the Art of Mourning
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