Anarcha
The Mother of Gynecology
Anarcha was an African American slave woman. She was one of the seventy-five slaves who worked the Wescott plantation, just on the outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama.
Anarcha went into labor one day. Three days later, she was still in labor. Dr Marion Sims was called in to assist the delivery. He writes in his autobiography that he used forceps on the fetus’s head but that he really didn’t know what he was doing since he’d had so little experience with the device. We don’t know whether the baby survived the ordeal. We do know that the mother experienced several vaginal tears from the birthing. She became incontinent afterwards due to the damage.
A few days later, the master of the plantation sent Anarcha to Dr Sims hoping he could repair the damage to his slave, as she could not hold her bowls or bladder. As her master’s chattel, her condition reduced her value considerably.
Sims took in the patient reluctantly. He put her up on his examination table, on her hands and knees and, using a modified pewter spoon to expand the walls of her vagina, he accidentally released the pressure that held her uterus in an awkward position. Anarcha felt immediate relief as the change in air pressure helped her uterus to relocate back into its proper position.
Through an agreement with her master, Anarcha became Dr Sims's guinea pig. She regularly underwent surgical experiments, while positioned on Sims’s table, squatting on all fours, and fully awake without the comfort of any anesthesia. It was commonly accepted that African Americans had a higher tolerance for pain than their white counterparts. Commonly accepted but utterly wrong.
Anarcha’s fistula (from her vaginal tears) was repaired by Sims. Sims thus became the leading expert in repairing this damage that seemed to occur in a good number of births by slave women. Though Sims was sent many slave women with fistulas, we know from his biography that he experimented repeatedly on Anarcha, as well as two other slaves, Betsy and Lucy.
Anarcha was experimented upon, and drugged up later, not to ease her pain as much as to stifle her moans. It has been calculated that she had been operated on, perhaps, 34 times. She, Betsy, Lucy, and countless others helped Dr Sims hone his techniques and create his gynecological tools. Though on display in museums, many of Dr Sims’s tools have modern counterparts that are used today.
Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy left no written legacy. Slaves were forbidden to read and write, a crime punishable by death.
And though science today looks back on Sims’s work ambiguously, truly unsure as to his level of success, or whether he should be credited as the father of gynecology, we now know who the mothers of modern gynecology were: they were the nameless and faceless slave women upon whom Dr Sims experimented.
Today we have just three names: Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy. It is our hope that these names will never be forgotten.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
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Calendar of Events
- June 1- Official Launch of Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative
- May 10, 7 pm, Gumbo YaYa @ Roses and Bread Women's Poetry Reading, Performance/Body Insallation, Brecht Forum NYC
- May 10, all day, Experimental Theatre Final Performances NYU
- May 7-8, all day, Gumbo YaYa, MA Symposium NYU
- April 23, 6 pm Gumbo YaYa, -ism Gala NYU
- March 26, 7 pm, Gumbo Yaya/ or this is why we speak in tongues, Tisch School of the Arts, Forum Series
- Feb. 7, Brecht Forum, 730, moderating NO! film screening
- Jan. 4, Common Ground Theatre, 8 pm, performance art night---Holding Space (a love poem for Meghan Williams)
- Dec. 12, Ripple in Brooklyn, 8 pm, sharing poetic vibes for a jazz/blues show
- Oct 27, Duke University, 9:45 am, Women Engage Hip-Hop Panel
- Sept 14, PS @ Tisch, How Much Can the Body Hold
- Sept 19, Righetous AIM, NC A & T
- August 31-Sept 2, 75TH Highlander Anniversary
- Anti-prison Industrial complex performance, Durham, NC
- April 30 Shout Out, Carrboro, NC
- April 24 Fingernails Across Chalkboard Reading, Washington, DC
- April 14 Poetry Month Reading, Durham, NC
- 3/31 Ringing Ear Reading, Chapel Hill, NC
- Wednesday 3/21 - 7 pm Miller Morgan Auditorium, Performative Healing and the Work of Ntozake Shange, Lecture
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