"As [Healthy] Women Should": Enslaved Women, Medical Experts, and "Hidden" Menstrual Disorders in Late Medieval Mediterranean Slave Markets.

This article examines how enslaved women’s bodies in fifteenth-century Iberia, particularly in Valencia, were exploited as clinical subjects in the production of learned gynecological knowledge within the context of the late medieval Mediterranean slave trade. It focuses on legal disputes—slave warranty suits—where menstrual disorders were frequently cited as "hidden defects," prompting university-trained male physicians to serve as expert witnesses who directly examined enslaved women’s genitalia to assess their health. The article highlights debates among physicians about the significance of menstruation to women’s overall health and shows how slave markets provided rare opportunities for empirical medical observation, contributing to the expansion of gynecological knowledge well before the more widely studied cases in the nineteenth-century US South. It also discusses the marginalization of female medical practitioners’ expertise and situates these practices within broader legal, medical, and social frameworks of the late medieval Mediterranean world.