Although the bookÆs topic and arguments are intriguing, it has serious flaws that detract from its overall effectiveness. We can agree with McGregorÆs arguments that æall too oftenÆ medical history has failed to take into accounts æthe relevance of social hierarchyÆ (220), but her sources prevent her from fully developing a response to this critique.
~Journal of the Early Republic
[McGregorÆs] book is about . . the birth of U.S. gynecology, and the central role played by J. Marion Sins M.D., and the WomenÆs Hospital of New York City. . . . This is an interesting and detailed account of the development of gynecology in the United States and the role that gender, class, and race played in this development. Those interested in the history of 19th-century American medicine, particularly surgery and gynecology, will find it useful.
~Journal of the American Medical Association
A useful, well-written history of an important development in American medicine.
~Journal of American Studies
McGregor spotlights how the specialty of gynecology rested on the availability of enslaved African American women to serve as subjects for repeated surgical experiments. . . . [McGregorÆs] reinterpretation of [J. Marion] Sims is important. Sims did not heroically solve a surgical problem alone; advances in gynecological surgery built on both the suffering of women who served as clinical subjects and the finances and work of female reformers who built specialty hospitals.
~Journal of American History
McGregor deftly contextualizes the struggles of medical science and experimentation within the social, sexual, and cultural landscape of the nineteenth century.
~John S. Haller Jr., Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
This innovative study of the early years of American gynecological practice deftly weaves together the career of J. Marion Sims and his medical contemporaries with accounts of female reform and institution-building, the haphazard story of surgical innovation, and, most importantly, the fraught historical intersections of gender, race, and class.
~Regina Morantz-Sanchez, author of Conduct Unbecoming aWoman": Gynecology on Trial in Turn-of-the-Century
