Materia Medica: Black Women, White Doctors, and Spectacular Gynecology

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.