Jenkins Schwartz examines encounters between Black mothers and White doctors in the South during the decades, leading up to it immediately after the Civil War. She follows contests between physicians, slaveholders, and enslaved women, as each attempted to manage reproduction for their own purpose and understanding. Doctors intervened socially, and culturally, and they transmuted pregnancy and childbirth into a series of unfolding events that reflected the choices made by physicians and their slaveholder clients. All while, slave women had their own ideas of what was fitting and effective.

Enslaved people incorporated certain Western ways of healing into their own store of knowledge but they also shunned those ways they deemed ineffective and inappropriate. Jenkins Schwartz shows that enslaved women wanted to space their pregnancies out while medical men wanted to increase the number of births. In times of crisis during pregnancy, the mother was always saved other the baby by doctors. Enslaved women approached pregnancy management differently they wanted to protect women and their unborn babies. Doctors fuel suspicion among slaveholders that enslaved often aborted their babies. They believed there was an unnatural tendency in the African-American women to destroy her offspring.

Jenkins Schwartz says Acquiring bodies were prized by doctors but public opposition made it hard. Doctors need bodies for their studies and museums. Body snatching was common and even White parents feared for their children's dead bodies. Deformed children dead or alive provided much interest for doctors.

Jenkins Schwartz talks about complicated surgeries that were successful and those that were not. She shows gynecology during the Civil War and after. As well as how midwifery was used mostly in the South after enslavement because of doctors' lack of care. The chapters that she covers are Procreation, Healers, Fertility, Pregnancy, Childbirth, Postnatal Complications, Gynecological Surgery, Cancer and Other Tumors, and Freedwomen's Health. This is a dense read but that is because it is older, and Jenkins Schwartz was one of the first to be writing about something like this.