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Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South. By Marie Jenkins Schwartz. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. [xii], 401. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-02202-5.)
Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South adds to a relatively small body of work that addresses the generally neglected aspect of southern antebellum history that joins slaves, slave owners, health, and medicine. Author Marie Jenkins Schwartz, in this case, pays particular attention to female slaves, their illnesses, and the development of the medical profession around them. In chapters covering topics ranging from fertility and pregnancy to pre- and postnatal complications, surgery, and disease, we see the medical men, slave owners, and female slaves all doing what they could to manage the reproductive health of enslaved women. The efforts of each were complicated by the interests of the others, however. The owners walked a fine line between not calling (and paying for) a physician too soon and calling one too late as they attempted to balance their primary interest in women's productive labor against the cost of protecting the women's health. Physicians walked an equally dangerous, if different, tightrope because, ultimately, the owner rather than the patient was the client. Thus, often a physician had no choice but to diagnose and treat the ill based on the owner's assessments...