ANARCHA, 2014, grosgrain ribbon, metallic embroidery floss, vintage obstetrics textbook, and velvet, 50 x 20 inches (diptych)
Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy
Dr. J. Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynecology,” developed groundbreaking surgical techniques and tools in the 1800s. The truth about how he discovered these medical breakthroughs is often missing. Sims experimented on enslaved black women, without anesthesia, even though it had recently become available. When working to find a cure for the vesico-vaginal fistula, he operated on seventeen-year old Anarcha thirty times without anesthesia. She had just given birth to her first child. Sims stated in his auto-biography, “there was never a time that I could not, at any day, have had a subject for operation.” He described that period in his life as his “most memorable.”
The medical community has celebrated and honored Sims, yet many books fail to mention the torture he forced upon enslaved black women. In the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Irwin H. Kaiser called Sims a “product of his era.” Generations of medical students were taught that Sims was a hero and did not learn of his torturous acts. White doctors continued to experiment on black people long after slavery ended, including the Tuskegee experiments, which started in 1932 and did not get shut down until 1972. To this day, racism, misogyny, and lack of consent in obstetrics profoundly affect health outcomes for black birthing people in the United States.
Sims experimented on at least ten women. We only know the names of three: Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey.
Each embroidered piece in this series is paired with a vintage obstetrics textbook that has been corrected with an attached footnote containing the truth. An accompanying viewer activated piece, Correcting History, is a call to action to amend library books with a downloadable bookmark provided on my website that contains the truth about Sims. This includes a database of 2,540 books, including thirteen different titles, with the location of libraries in all fifty states that have the books in need of the truth. Click the button below to help correct history.
