This dissertation is an examination of the lives of pioneering physicians and both enslaved and Irish-immigrant women within the creation of modern American gynecology. It delves deeply into these women's usage as sexual surgery and experimental patients. The dissertation locates the nexus that linked race and ignominy between these two groups of "degraded" women during the antebellum era through the lens of medicine. Simultaneously, this study elucidates how their "colored" bodies also became equalized on operating tables.

One of the great ironies of the experimental sexual surgeries performed on enslaved and poor Irish-immigrant women, was the undeniable fact that doctors and surgeons knew that these women's so-called "imperfect" bodies were perfect anatomical exemplars to repair gynecological disorders for white women. This dissertation illuminates the modes of representation by which doctors and their black enslaved and impoverished, Irish-immigrant patients came to play exemplary roles within the dominant meta-narrative of American medical histories and modern gynecology.