By Nadia Johnson
Most people have never heard of James Marion Sims. He is considered to be the father of modern–day gynecology, but there is a horrific history of how he gained that off the backs of enslaved African – American women.
Today’s black history month lesson is about who James Marion Sims is and what he did to the women who were unfortunate enough to be his patients. It all started in 1845 when Sims was brought a woman with a condition he had not seen before in his medical practice. The condition that the woman had was a vesicvaginal fistula. Vesicovaginal fistulas often occurred when a woman’s bladder, cervix, and vagina became trapped between the fetal skull and the woman’s pelvis, which cut off the blood flow and leads to tissue death. The necrotic tissue would later come off, leaving a hole. This injury would become a very smelly problem because the urine would form and it is with the hole in the bladder that would lead to urine leaking. Since there was no way to repair the hole the urine would constantly leak, which made women who had this problem to be outcast in society. However, Sims had come up with a way to cure the condition through surgery.
Sims’ vaginal speculum.
According to an auto-biography article on Wikipedia Sims, it was between 1845 and 1849, that Sims performed experimental surgery on enslaved black women and girls to treat vaginal problems. He added a second story to his four-bed hospital, doubling its capacity. [13]: 10 The techniques he developed have since formed the basis of modern vaginal surgery. Sim also created the vaginal speculum, which aided in vaginal examination and surgery. The rectal examination position, in which the patient is on the left side with the right knee flexed against the abdomen and the left knee slightly flexed, is also named for him. (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
Sims named the three enslaved black women and girls he used in his autobiography: Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy. Each of them suffered from fistula, and all were subjects of his surgical experimentation. [7] Sims conducted experimental surgery on each of them several times, including operating on Anarcha thirty times before the repair of her fistulas was declared a success. [24] In some cases, like Anarcha’s, who is estimated to have been 13 years of age when first treated by Sims, some of the enslaved women were girls, who in having been victims of childhood sexual assault by their enslaved, were physically immature for the act of giving birth, likely contributing to the severity and extend of their childbirth complications. It is thought that he performed these surgeries without using any anesthesia on the patients because he thought that black women could either feel no pain or have a higher pain tolerance, which is a method of thinking that still holds in the medical field when treating black people.
So the next time you go to get a checkup at your gynecologist remember that the knowledge that was gained to create the modern-day gynecology field comes from the suffering and untold stories of our ancestors. They may be gone but they are not forgotten. Rest in peace and happy Black History Month.
