From Midwives to Medicine: The Birth of American Gynecology

Deborah Kuhn McGregor

Rutgers University Press, 1998 - Biography & Autobiography - 273 pages

From Midwives to Medicine examines the development of modern medical treatment of women and the related history of women's health in the mid-1800s. McGregor looks not only at the medical figures who devised and practiced the innovative therapist, but also at the history of the patient experience in the development and the professionalization of a medical specialty. In exploring the controversial career of J. Marion Sims, "the father of gynecology," and the history of the Woman's Hospital of the State of New York, McGregor chronicles the emergence of a practice involving previously untried medical techniques and the use of experimentation on patients according to a social hierarchy based on race and sex.

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."

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Contents

• 1: 1
• 4: 2
• Peoples and Places: 8
• Anarcha Betsey and Lucy: 33
• Missions and Medicine: 69
• First Womans Hospital: 73
• The logo for the Womans Hospital Association: 87
• Patients and Practice: 105
• Sims and Margaret Brennan illustrating the steps of vesicovaginal fistula surgery and the Simss Position: 106
• 7: 107
• Chart on the origins of vesicovaginal fistula 8: 114
• A School for Gynecologists: 126
• Thomas Addis Emmet: 128
• Anterior view of female pelvis 11: 134
• Ancillary view of female pelvis: 135
• Power Politics and Profession: 167
• Baldwin and Wetmore Pavilions: 168
• 13: 169
• 14: 172
• ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES 17 Illustrations Home of Simss first patients in Montgomery Alabama J Marion Sims with Anarcha Betsey and Luc...: 173
• Ward at the Womans Hospital Uniformed nurse with patient in Simss Position receiving anesthesia: 182
• Cottages around the Wetmore Pavilion built to prevent contagion: 194
• and hospitalism Elizabeth Cullum member of the Board of Lady Supervisors at the Womans Hospital: 211
• Stained glass window in the chapel of the Womans Hospital: 212
• 30: 226
• 70: 227
• 87: 229
• 106: 231
• 114: 237
• 127: 248
• 135: 254
• 168: 264
• 210: 265

Bibliographic information

• Title: From Midwives to Medicine: The Birth of American Gynecology; From Midwives to Medicine: The Birth of American Gynecology, Deborah Kuhn McGregor
• Author: Deborah Kuhn McGregor
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1998
• ISBN: 0813525721, 9780813525723
• Length: 273 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / General; Medical / History