Pregnant slaves, workers in labour: amid doctors and masters in a slave-owning city (nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro)

Focusing on the city of Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century, this article explores the relations between medical advances in the fields of gynaecology and obstetrics, medical interventions in the bodies of enslaved women and the interests of slave-owners, who appealed to doctors as a last resort in the face of the worsening of uterine diseases and complications in childbirth that put their captives' lives, health and capacity for labour at risk. (AU)