Birthing a slave : motherhood and medicine in the antebellum South History of Medicine seminar Obstetrics -- history Maternal Health Services -- history Women's Health -- history Black or African American -- history Reproductive Behavior -- history Cultural Characteristics History, 19th Century After the United States government banned the importing of enslaved people in 1808, an economic system dependent on slavery could be maintained only through babies born in bondage. Black women, however, proved an unruly force, distrustful of both slaveholders and their doctors. With their own healing traditions, enslaved women struggled to determine their own health in a system that neither understood nor respected their social circumstances, customs, and values.Competing approaches to reproductive health evolved on plantations, as both black women and white men sought to control the health and fertility of enslaved mothers. Credits: Introduction by Stephen Greenberg ; speaker, Marie Jenkins Schwartz. Received: July 26, 2007; transfer; from Stephen Greenberg, Ph.D., Reference Librarian, History of Medicine Division. [Bethesda, Md. : National Library of Medicine, 2007] Schwartz, Marie Jenkins, 1946- National Library of Medicine (U.S.) Moving image 085 min. Sound Color Live action nlm:nlmuid-101312855-vid 101312855 http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/101312855 OCLC: 166278585 English Southeastern United States The National Library of Medicine believes this item to be in the public domain: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/