Page 108
“…went to Sunday dinners…”
See “On Sundays…,” above.
“…ten in all…”
Sims’s original 1852 fistula article said very little about the subjects of his earliest experiments. Later, he was mostly consistent with the number of early experimental subjects. Later commentators would often incorrectly assume that the number of subjects was limited to the three women that Sims named as having initially triggered the experiments. These are the best sources for the number of women who were part of the early experiments, though Sims did perform fistula experiments on additional women who appeared only after he claimed to have achieved his initial cure. These women appear in later chapters.
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 236.
Sims, J. M., & New York Academy of Medicine. (1858). Silver sutures in surgery. New York: S.S. & W. Wood, p. 52.
“…it was incurable…”
Although Sims claimed to have investigated the subject deeply—and later cited those doctors who had succeeded in achieving cures—it was not uncommon for him to characterize fistula as completely incurable.
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, pp. 227, 229.
“Why did he need her to approve?”
Anarcha’s monologue here is a way of grappling with one of the most contentious issues of the Alabama fistula experiments. Sims’s detractors have described the experiments as torture, while his supporters take a more circumspect view. The facts are relatively clear: Sims did not need consent to adhere to the ethical standard of his time (and he regularly railed against medical ethics), and just prior to the fistula experiments he had published work specifying that capital, or major, surgery did not require a willing patient (see “…regardless of whether a patient was willing,” above). At the same time, Sims would have had no chance of success in fistula surgery without an experimental subject who was at least ostensibly agreeing to undergo a procedure. This sequence begins my portrayal of how Sims essentially coerced his experimental subjects, which to my mind amounts to a form of psychological torture. Sims’s subjects were offered a false choice, like he false choice depicted at the end of William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. Later chapters further illustrate Sims’s coercion.
In addition, I am using Anarcha’s perspective here to give voice to a theme that runs subtly through Sims’s work, and is present in the work of his critics: his so-called altruism was actually brazen self-promotion.