Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant: The Cultural Politics and Bioethics of Reproductive Surgery in Mexico, 1800-1940

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary This dissertation research project is in the history of science; it focuses on reproductive surgery in Mexico with a particular emphasis on the politics of cesarean sections and sterilizing operations. The project explores religious, state, and scientific debates and their relations to the development of clinical operations. It will address how reproductive surgeries acquire racial and religious concerns, and under what circumstances these concerns shift or persist. It will draw on a range of archival sources, including hospital registers, medical records, prison reports, newspaper articles, and letters from doctors, midwives, patients, and medical students. It will link a range of themes and actors to investigate the factors that influenced clinical decisions and how they affected the lives patients. The investigator (the Co-PI) will also develop a historical database of information about public client demographics, surgical technologies, and patient complaints regarding reproductive surgeries in Mexico. She will develop this data in coordination with the Mexican Secretary of Health's project on maternal healthcare, and she will make the information available to lawmakers, international NGOs, and advocacy groups. Technical Summary The intellectual merit of the project is based in the approach to the history science that gives priority to long-term historical structures over events. The historical range begins in the late colonial period. Doing so will allow the investigator to fully establish and explore the key theme: State, Church, and popular conflicts over defining and managing bodies and souls in birth (and in death). The project will utilize documents that illuminate the connections between surgical technologies, childbirth, and religious and spiritual worldviews. Doing so will facilitate an analysis of two important themes: the social construction of race in medical practice, and the role of religion in both shaping and reacting to scientific ideologies. The project aims to develop and to engage with original historical and philosophical frameworks for analyzing reproductive surgeries; as a result, it has the potential to modify how historians think about the global history of obstetrics.