J M Sims’ slave experimentation

This article explores the darker, lesser-known history of James Marion Sims, who is celebrated as the ‘father of gynaecology’. Born in 1813, Sims spent his early life in South Carolina. Although it’s not what his father wanted, Sims found himself wanting to pursue medicine. In 1832, he started attending medical lectures at the Charleston Medical College in Charleston. Soon, he enrolled at the Jefferson Medical College, and obtained his medical degree in 1835

It was a time when doctors didn’t have to undergo rigorous training like they do today. After graduating, Sims set up his own medical practice and started treating people. However, his wasn’t the best beginning. When his first two patients died, Sims’s reflex was to leave and ‘start fresh’. In 1837, he moved to Macon County, Alabama, where he saw some success as a ‘plantation physicist’. He became popular for his operations on club feet, cleft plates and crossed eyes on the local slaves.

Like most male doctors who hesitated to treat female patients, Sims was initially reluctant to study gynaecology. But, when he was brought an enslaved woman suffering from severe back and pelvic pain after falling from a horse, Sims had to find a way to treat the woman. The lithotomy position, usually used by physicians of that time, was not very helpful in that patient’s case. So Sims came up with a better position, now termed as the Sims’ position, which allowed a better examination of the vagina. This case was revolutionary in his career, as he also became the trailblazer of the modern speculum- which is used to see the walls of the vagina and cervix.

In the 1840s, many enslaved women in the southern United States were affected by a condition called the vesicovaginal fistulas. It usually arises from traumatic childbirth, which causes the tissues to rupture into the urinary bladder due to extended pressure on the vaginal walls. This rupture leads to incontinence of urine through the vaginal opening. In the 1840s, the experimental surgeries to cure the condition rarely succeeded.

It was during this time that Sims started experimenting with his vaginal treatments on enslaved black women. He conducted surgeries on at least a dozen women, but the names of three particular women are well-known-Lucy, Anarcha and Betsy. Sims mentions in his autobiography about negotiating with the slave owners for temporary ownership of the women.

Sims’ first patient, Lucy, who was 18 at the time, was stripped naked and was forced to endure an hour-long surgery without anaesthesia. She screamed in pain while a dozen other doctors just stood there watching her. This surgery, however, ended terribly. Lucy developed severe infections from the device placed into her bladder, and she had her days of extreme agony.

He did similar surgeries on Betsy and Anarcha as well, and the results were no different. Although the local medical community stopped supporting Sims at this point, Lucy, Betsy and Anarcha were left in his custody. Because, with a condition that made them social outcasts, they were no longer needed by their enslavers. Sims trained them to assist him during the surgeries.

He performed thirty surgeries on Anarcha alone, out of which 29 failed. And mind you, twenty-nine painful surgeries on a 17-year-old while she was still conscious. In 1849, after about four years of experimenting, it occurred to Sims to use silver sutures to repair the vesicovaginal fistulas. On his thirtieth surgery on Anarcha, Sims was able to close the fistula successfully, and Anarcha made a complete recovery. Sims tried the exact same procedure on Lucy and Betsy in the following weeks to ensure that the initial one was not a fluke, and those surgeries succeeded as well.

Marion Sims also reportedly experimented on slave infants. He thought that the skull shape of the babies was the cause of neonatal tetanus. He used shoemaker’s tools, like awls, to forcibly align the bones. And whenever one of his patients died, he would blame the patient’s mother and the black midwives who attended to them.