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Transcript:
I have to start this video with a content warning, because I’m going to be discussing some male-on-female violence and slavery, but I hope you are able to watch because I think it’s important. I mean, obviously I think all my videos are important but this one is especially relevant to the coming days: February 28th and March 1st are the Betsey, Lucy, and Anarcha Days of Recognition, so it’s a great time to learn about these Mothers of Gynechology.
Earlier this week, I told you about how President Donald Trump is trying to appoint an anti-birth control freak to the position of Surgeon General. Shortly thereafter, my friend Dr. Kaveh Hoda invited me to join an episode of his podcast, House of Pod, to talk about how the patriarchy impacts women’s health, and our co-host for that episode was OB/GYN Dr. Kirti Patel. The show should be out on Tuesday and I highly recommend you subscribe to House of Pod on the podcast app of your choice to make sure you get it. I learned several things, like how apparently it’s equally correct to say “oh bee gynn” so you can save yourself a few syllables, but I’m going to need some time to get used to that.
I also learned from Dr. Patel that a few years back, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, or ACOG, officially designated the last day of Black History Month and the first day of Women’s History Month as Betsey, Lucy, and Anarcha Days of Recognition following a suggestion from ACOG member Dr. Veronica Maria Pimentel. And while I vaguely knew these women’s story, I would not have been able to name them offhand. And so, I wanted to share their story with you in order to properly remember them.
Betsey, Lucy, and Anarcha were three enslaved girls in Alabama who in the mid-1880s were surgically experimented upon by J. Marion Sims, one of the most famous and celebrated physicians of his time. As I mentioned in that previous video on Casey Means, a lot of the health pseudoscience women fall for today can be traced to the fact that for millennia, medical science ignored that women existed. As such, there was no field of gynecology at the time that Sims began his practice, and the workings of the female reproductive system were unknown and left to midwives to figure out.
As such, Sims’ work led to him performing the first successful vaginal surgeries, he developed catheters and speculums that are still used today, and he established the first women’s hospital in the United States. He was so famous even Europeans knew him, he was rich as shit, and he served as the president of the American Medical Association. Statues in his honor have been erected in New York (where he set up his women’s hospital) and in Alabama, where he spent the majority of his early career. He was widely considered the “Father of Gynecology.”
That work is obviously incredibly important. But like a lot of early heroes of medicine, Sims was an absolute monster. You see, he was a Southern boy who saw slaves as lesser people, and believed that Black people could not feel pain in the same way that White people can, a belief that is actually disgustingly common even today. And so he decided to try his earliest surgeries on enslaved girls, buying or renting at least ten of them to experiment upon, with only three of them known by name because he mentioned them in his autobiography, The Story of My Life: Betsey, Lucy, and Anarcha. Anarcha is the only one of the three who he gave a last name: Westcott, which has allowed intrepid investigators to track down more information about her.
These girls, who were teenagers (Anarcha may have been as young as 13) were brought to Sims after experiencing prolonged childbirth that led to vesicovaginal and rectovaginal fistulas, which is a debilitating condition in which the tissue between the vagina and bladder (or rectum) is torn, leading to urine or feces leaking through. This was a fairly common condition in enslaved girls because they did not receive proper care or nutrition throughout their pregnancies. Sims operated on these girls with no anesthesia, which had recently been put into practice, though Sim later claimed that he didn’t know it was an option. He did not later operate on any white women without offering them anesthesia.
He also, obviously, operated on them without consent. They were slaves that he paid for, and as such they could not reasonably consent.
He experimented on them dozens of times, but recorded almost nothing about who they were. In other essays about his patients, he recorded information about them, but he included no such details about these girls. Anarcha was simply “a little negro girl” who slept in the room with him according to his autobiography. We don’t know how this child got pregnant, how she felt about her condition or the surgeries, or even whether or not the surgeries were successful.
My point here, obviously, is not to “cancel” J. Marion Sims. A heart attack took care of that 140 years ago. But much like in the case of Albert Kligman, who experimented on poor Black and Brown prisoners to develop treatments for athlete’s foot, we must be honest about how humanity has benefited from abject cruelty. Sim’s gynecological breakthroughs first and foremost tortured Black girls and benefited the White women who were treated with respect and, crucially, anesthesia. Things have certainly gotten better in developed countries, but Black and Brown people still struggle against many of the same biases and pseudoscience that proliferated a century ago. And while vesicovaginal and rectovaginal fistulas are relatively rare in the US today, they are quite common in the global South, where mostly Black and Brown people do not have access to the same level of prenatal care that we have here, and accordingly they do not have the same access to gynecological care to fix the condition. So the injustice is still happening, just on a different level.
If you’re interested in learning more about what a bastard Sims was, Dr. Hoda was actually on a 2-part episode of the podcast Behind the Bastards where they discussed him in detail.
If you’d like to learn more about the girls who are now considered the mothers of gynecology, there’s a documentary called Remembering Anarcha available on streaming networks and a book by JC Hallman titled “Say Anarcha: A Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women’s Health.”
There’s also a really cool sculpture in Montgomery, Alabama by artist Michelle Browder made of donated welded metal objects.
Finally, ACOG is hosting a memorial panel discussion on March 2nd, “addressing topics such as evidence-based practices that promote informed consent, ethical decision-making in medicine, one’s right to choose, and the physician’s role in supporting patient rights.” You can watch it online and also check out past years’ contributions.
So, here’s to Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and our continued remembrance of these important historical figures during a time when the racists and misogynists are futilely attempting to make us forget.
