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“…the wives of the men who owned it…”
“The Old Montgomery Hall,” Hannah McIntyre Cozart, the Montgomery Journal, August 6, 1916, p. 12.
“There were servant quarters at Montgomery Hall…”
“The Old Montgomery Hall,” Hannah McIntyre Cozart, the Montgomery Journal, August 6, 1916, pp. 13-14.
“…they found the plank board…”
See “He drew up plans…,” above.
There is no record of what Sims did with the plank board he had made to enable surgical experimentation on an unwilling patient, but it is not likely that he would have immediately discarded it, or that he would have removed it from the hospital where he had used it, and likely intended to use it again, as to his mind the experiment had been successful.
“Some of the women were horrified…”
The speculation here on the motivations of Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, and the others is, once again, a way of grappling with one of the more controversial aspects of the Alabama fistula experiments: how and why enslaved women—incapable of providing formal, informed consent—would have come to act as Sims’s assistants and nurses. Hope of a cure for some semblance of normalcy, and outright fear for their lives if they were sold away, are possible motives that Sims could have played on in coercing the women—already a form of psychological torture—to become “willing” participants in the experiments.
“After Christmas…”
Sims, J. M., & New York Academy of Medicine. (1858). Silver sutures in surgery. New York: S.S. & W. Wood, p. 53.
“…the speech itself was an experiment…”
Sims did not record any attempt to communicate the details of the experiments to his enslaved subjects, but as he needed them to be cooperative—although they could not provide consent—he most certainly would have described to them what he intended to do, if only to play on their hopes of a cure. Although Sims was never a teacher, there are accounts of lectures he gave in which he demonstrated his procedure on some type of fabric before then proceeding to execute his operation on a live patient (in later life, these were almost exclusively white women).
“Reminiscences of Dr. J. Marion Sims in Paris,” Edmond Souchon, Medical Record, Vol. 46, No. 23, December 8, 1894, p. 706.