Whew! It was almost hard for me to find myself a seat at this talk.
Deirdre Cooper Owens is a historian whose work focuses on the intersections of medicine, race, and gender in the United States. She is known for her book Medical Bondage, where she explores how enslaved Black women’s bodies were subjected to medical experimentation and played a significant role in the development of modern gynecology. Her research sheds light on how systemic racism influenced medical practices in the 19th century and continues to shape healthcare inequalities today.
She began by asking, “Why does the 19th century matter so much?”. To me, it instantly clicked that everything we have today is built on history.
Bondage was a recurring theme. Even when Black women weren’t enslaved, they never had control of how their bodies were treated. She tied this into Dr Samuel Cartwright and medical racism. Cartwright used an 1860s spirometer to measure lung capacity in patients. He argued that because Black people had less lung capacity as he claimed, this made Black people inferior to white people. He used this information to support scientific racism and why Black people should be enslaved. We still see scientific racism appearing today when it comes to accessibility to treatment. The CDC reported that more than 80% of pregnancy-related deaths were preventable in 2022.
Something that stuck with me was when Cooper Owens said, “When we are taking the MCAT, we will not purposely get an answer wrong because it goes against what we believe to be the truth. But when a lot of us get into the actual practice, we fabricate the truth in findings because they disagree with our stigmas or beliefs. This to me goes to show how there is still covert and institutionalised racism. Society usually knows right from wrong in medical practice, but decides to go against the truth because they see inferiority in marginalized groups”.
She ended the talk by recognizing one of her favorite women in history, Elizabeth Freeman. Freeman fought for the right to bodily autonomy by claiming she no longer wanted to be enslaved. By suing for her freedom, she argued that no one had the right to own or control her body, helping establish a legal and moral foundation for individuals to have the right to bodily autonomy.
-Ahmed Omo