| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Marie Jenkins Schwartz. Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2006. Pp. ix, 401. $29.95.
This book on the health and medical care of slave women, particularly their reproductive functions, relies on an extensive and rich cache of journal and archival material. Marie Jenkins Schwartz reinforces the critical importance of child-bearing in slavery, the investment of owners in matters affecting fertility, and the formal and informal relationship between owners and medical healers—both professional and lay. Faced with issues of birthing, infertility, menstrual disorders, cancers, and a multitude of gynecological complaints, black women found themselves struggling to maintain a semblance of control over their bodies in a culture whose medical doctors served the plantation management and not the patient. Southern doctors played a large and significant role in the treatment of slave women's health during the antebellum years. Until emancipation, the encounter could be described as invasive, demeaning, brutal, and exploitative. Being identified with the slaveholder, not the slave, the physician carried into the physician-patient relationship a uniquely distinct authority role not found among northern and European contemporaries.	1
The intimate and intrusive nature of this relationship encouraged slave women to seek alternative lay healers from within their own and neighboring slave communities. When possible, slave women preferred to rely on each other in matters of health, reaching out to elderly women and granny midwives who brought ancient customs and folk medicine into the birthing and sick room. In spite of the limited medical knowledge provided by this option, women found it a welcome choice. In these patient-healer relationships, the woman's health and reproductive functions remained in the hands of the woman, not of the slave owner.	. . .

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