The Medical Plantation
December 28, 2007 – 3:33 am(Projection/Narration, intersected by images of Montgomery, Alabama, and other Sims statues in NYC, South Carolina, other Alabama towns, and images of slave life in the 1840s and 50s)1846: Montgomery doctor J. Marion Sims pays to build a hospital with 16 beds in his backyard. He was setting out to find an operative cure for women’s fistula, openings between the bladder and the vaginal or rectal region, often caused by prolonged childbirth - a relatively common condition that made women incontinent.Sims asked plantation owners to provide him with subjects, slave women. In the following 3 years, Sims worked on up to 11 patients at a time.
We only know 3 names: ANARCHA, BETSEY and LUCY. Sims tells in his biography that he operated on ANARCHA more than 30 times. He did not use anesthesia for the operations on their vaginas, but he used opium to aid with recovery. His development of the speculum made him the first modern doctor to actually look at and into women’s vaginas.
We know nothing about the women, about whether they were cured, where they went, when they died. Later, Sims used the methods and instruments he developed to become the celebrated and well-traveled ‘father of gynecology’.
(excerpted from The Anarcha Project)
When the anesthesia forced my body to unconsciousness for my hysterectomy, I did not know about Sims and the medical plantation; had not been taught about the tremendous suffering endured by Anarcha. I think Sim’s behavior and Anarcha’s pain is another connection white people have to african-americans that we struggle to even acknowledge. That our lives are better because of the history of real pain and suffering of African-Americans.
Sims brutalized Anarcha, his pre-modern speculum a weapon. Each endeavor on his part to find a surgical answer to fistulas a rape. Yet his pioneering work culminates in my complete hysterectomy.
Anarcha become a tool in his medical manifest destiny and mine. Her cries echo in echo in that cavity that remains in my body.