Surgery and Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico

Elizabeth O’Brien interweaves the history of medicine with social and cultural history to examine the themes of gender, race, religion, empire, and nation in the production of medical knowledge.

Her first book, Surgery and Salvation: Religion, Racial Medicine, and Reproductive Politics in Mexico, 1745-1940, is currently under contract with the University of North Carolina Press and expected to be released later this year. In the book, Dr. O’Brien illuminates how religious and theological ideas influenced obstetric surgery over time; how race and class became organizing logics for discourses about surgical advancement; and how childbearing people in Mexico experienced, and sometimes contested, the ways in which patriarchal medical authorities influenced their reproductive choices.

Her research has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies/The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, the American Historical Association, and the History of Science Society. Surgery and Salvation is based on her award-winning dissertation project, which has earned the Forum for History of Human Science Dissertation Prize, the LACS-SHA Richmond Brown Prize, and The Nineteenth Century Section of the Latin American Studies Association. Dr. O’Brien is also the author of numerous scholarly articles, including most recently “Obstetric Violence in Historical Perspective.” Her work has also been featured in the Washington Post, with her article “The religious history of Caesarean surgery and what it means for the abortion battle: How colonial powers used Caesareans to define the boundaries of unborn life.”

Dr. O’Brien is Assistant Professor of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, and is currently on a COMEXUS-Fulbright fellowship in Mexico.