5/14/21

    During colonial times, medical and experimental exploitation of enslaved people mirrored the social and economic abuses that they were forced into at the time. All of the narratives of experiments during this time are horrific. An example that I found particularly shocking were experiments conducted by a physician named James Marion Sims.

    James Marion Sims is a historically revered figure for his research in women’s health. He founded the New York Women’s Hospital- “the first hospital for women.” His research even led him to become invited into royal circles, becoming friends with the French royal family. When he passed away, there were many monuments and memorials that were built in his memory. One still exists in Central Park celebrating his accomplishments and goodwill “treating alike empress and slave”. He is a good representation of the disturbing two faced quality of American Medicine.

    Sims has a very large track record ranging from blaming the morals and intellectual inadequacy of enslaved mothers for the high death rates of their infants children, to using exclusively black children on his experimentations in tetany (a children’s neuromuscular disease) prying open their skulls and shifting them into different shapes (when the children died he would blame their death on the sloppiness and ignorance of their mothers). The experiment that he gained his fame and fortune from was that of vesicovaginal fistula (a condition following complication in childbirth).

    Vesicovaginal fistula are a condition that affected many women at the time, black and white, who survived a complication in childbirth. We now know that, due to vitamin D deficiency, and the fact that enslaved women became mothers at a younger age than white women and their pelvises were underdeveloped, enslaved women had higher rates of this complication However, physicians blamed the condition on the ignorance of black midwives. Sims, in exchange for free board and treatment, got 11 enslaved women who had vesicovaginal fistula. At the time, while treating women’s health issues, it was customary for physicians to rely on their sense of touch, treating women under their skirts. Sims, however, underfed the women to undress completely and kneel on their hands and knees inserting a special device he created to get a full view of their vaginas. Physicians, and even some citizens came to visit and see the women in this mortifying state. The surgeries were horrifying, consisting of him opening and knitting back together vaginal tissue. Male doctors initially came to hold down the women, but after a while even they couldn’t take the emotional strain of the surgeries and he forced the women to restrain each other. Anesthesia existed at the time, and Sims knew about it, but he decided that what the women were in during was “not painfully enough to justify the trouble and risk attending the administration,” (however, when performing these procedures on white women, he decided to always administer anesthesia.) However, interestingly, Sims decided to administer the enslaved women morphine **only after** surgery. He claimed it was to help them sleep through the night. The morphine did allow the women to sleep through the night, but it also allowed for him to control their behavior because their addiction caused them to resist the procedures less; it caused them mentally to associate the completion of the procedures with getting morphine. In the end, he was able to close the fistula of one of the women. He announced his success, and became celebrated as the “father of American gynecology”.