Page 114
“…for at least a fortnight…”
“On the Treatment of Vesico-Vaginal Fistula,” J. Marion Sims, The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, Vol. XXIII, 1852, p. 80.
“The opium should be given at least twice per day…”
“On the Treatment of Vesico-Vaginal Fistula,” J. Marion Sims, The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, Vol. XXIII, 1852, p. 80.
“…pleasant dreams and delightful sensation.”
“On the Treatment of Vesico-Vaginal Fistula,” J. Marion Sims, The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, Vol. XXIII, 1852, pp. 80-81.
“…cure them all in six months’ time.”
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 236.
“They all had good masters…”
Sims’s characterizations of Nathan Harris (Betsey’s owner) and Tom Zimmerman (Lucy’s owner) are equally benign, if not as overtly fawning.
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, pp. 227.28.
“…but if they were not cured…”
Although even today fistula sufferers in Africa are subjected to a belief that their injury might be the result of a curse that has been placed on them, there has been virtually no acknowledgement that the folk beliefs of enslaved populations in the South—so-called “hoodoo” and “conjure”—may have affected the experience of Sims’s earliest experimental subjects. In Sims’s reported speech here, I am asserting that in order to leverage cooperation from his subjects he would have issued these veiled threats based on home, family, and the traditional beliefs held by some enslaved people.