Random Complicated History Of "Father Of Gynecology" J. Marion Sims (11 items)

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  (#7) Defenders Claim Sims's Advances Were Worth The Ethical Problems

  Was Sims simply a man of his time? As Sarah Zhang wrote for The Atlantic, "To implicate [Sims], his defenders implied, is to implicate medicine in mid-19th century America." It was common practice not to use anesthesia, after all, and medical ethics was barely in its infancy.

  Sims's more virulent defenders claim the medical advances he pioneered justify his ethical violations. Some even suggest Sims's patients, slave women with fistulas, would have consented to the experiments to cure their medical problems, even if their consent was not legally required at the time. However, the logic underlying such a suggestion - that we can look backward and know what individuals would have said or done had their circumstances been different, without explicit statements from those individuals - is inherently fallacious.
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  (#2) In His Writing, Sims Documented The Pain He Caused His Slave Patients

  While Sims has been memorialized with numerous statues, his descriptions of medical experiments on slave women, performed without anesthesia, are difficult to read. In his first surgical case, Sims operated on a young slave named Lucy. He wrote:

  That was before the days of anesthetics, and the poor girl [Lucy], on her knees, bore the operation with great heroism and bravery. I had about a dozen doctors there to witness the series of experiments I expected to perform... At the end of five days [Lucy] was very ill. She had fever, frequent pulse, and real blood-poisoning, but we did not know what to call it at that day and time.

  During the operation, Sims intentionally left a sponge in Lucy's bladder, but it became dangerously infected. Sims recalled, "Lucy's agony was extreme... I thought she was going to die."
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  (#4) Sims Invented The Speculum Using A Bent Spoon On A Slave Patient Named Betsey

  Sims invented the vaginal speculum, an important tool used by gynecologists to this day. He came up with the idea when a white patient visited Sims after falling off a horse, which caused a prolapsed uterus. After repairing the problem, Sims decided to take a closer look at one of his patients, a slave named Betsey.

  Sims realized that by using the bent handle of a pewter spoon, he could better diagnose Betsey's medical problem. Sims later wrote that he told his patient, "'Betsey, I told you that I would send you home this afternoon, but before you go I want to make one more examination of your case.' She willingly consented." Using the spoon, Sims diagnosed Betsey with a fistula. He also reported, "I saw everything, as no man had ever seen before."
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  (#5) For A Long Time, The Medical Profession Praised Sims, Even While Acknowledging The Issues With His Work

  For decades, the medical profession praised Sims for his groundbreaking research, even while acknowledging the ethical problems with the way he conducted that research. As Dr. Tatiana M. Gellein found in her research, the first critiques of Sims's work did not emerge until the civil rights movement.

  Even in 1978, the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology published an article that concluded, "[Sims's] original three subjects might never have tolerated the pain and misery of the repeated operations had they not been slaves. In the long run, they had reason to be grateful to Sims."
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  (#9) We Have No Record Of How The Enslaved Women Felt About The Experiments, Only Sims's Writing

  In 2012 the Annals of Surgery journal defended Sims's experiments, after first acknowledging the controversy: "Some writers have criticized the ethicality and morality of his clinical practice because it involved the enslaved and indentured." After this acknowledgment, the article dismissed the problem of patient consent, arguing that "relief of pain was the major concern for both master and bondsman," a statement that ignores brutal methods of controlling slaves and the sexual assault of slave women by their masters.

  The medical article repeated Sims's claim that his patients were willing to undergo his experiments. "Ladies, both free and enslaved, who suffered from that calamity, desired the opportunity to be healed. Dr. Sims stated, 'My patients are all perfectly satisfied with what I am doing for them.'" Sims may have claimed his patients consented, but we have no records from the women he operated on - including 30 surgical operations on Anarcha without anesthesia.
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  (#10) Sims Also Experimented On Slave Children Based On The Dominant Racist Beliefs Of His Era

  In addition to his surgical experiments on Black women, Sims also tested his methods on enslaved Black children. But his attempts to cure neonatal tetanus were unsuccessful. As part of his experimental treatments, Sims used shoemaker's tools to "loosen" the bones in Black children's skulls, based on the belief that Black people were less intelligent than white people because their skulls were too tight.

  While Sims may have pioneered important medical techniques, he did so by abusing Black bodies with the conviction that they were inferior to white patients. However, his views were within the mainstream for 19th-century medical science.

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