Mexican Women's Pelves and Obstetrical Procedures

Interventions with Forceps in Late 19th-Century Medicine

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3946798
AutoresLaura Cházaro, Paul Kersey
Ano2005
Volume79
Fascículo1
Páginas100-115
Data de publicação2005-03-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
EditoraSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400204
OpenAlexW1990828216
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas3
Referências citadas14

This essay is an inquiry into the socio-cultural history of the use of forceps in 19th-century Mexico. It argues that the knowledge and practices that the use of such instruments implied were related to complex and controversial issues of the time regarding gender, race and national identity. In my study of operations involving forceps, I found that the adoption of medical instruments depended not only upon their supposedly greater operative efficiency but also upon the political and medical meanings attributed to the pelves of Mexican women. Early 19th-century obstetrics conceived the womb as an example of 'living nature' whose qualities assured that births were 'normally happy events' making the use of forceps and other instruments unnecessary. However, by mid-century, in the aftermath of independence, Mexico was desperately attempting to forge its identity as a nation. Due to European theories of race, Mexican women came to be characterized as having pathologically deformed pelves that evidenced possible defects of racial formation. The analysis of operative practices involving forceps reveals just how strongly such medical instruments became charged with a complex political definition of the 'mestizo race', which was seen to hold political promise for the future. In this context, forceps ceased to symbolize the threat of death, with which they had been associated since colonial times, and became artefacts that helped to assure the safe delivery of newborn mestizos by overcoming the problems of Mexican women's pathological pelves; although by the same token, the status of women as biologically inferior beings in need of medical assistance was reconfirmed

Aesthetics · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Forceps · Identity (music · Independence (probability theory · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Latin American history and culture · Law · Medicine · Surgery