Page 119
“…mostly closed.”
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 239.
“He removed the stitches and the bars…”
Sims performs here a sly bit of rhetorical misdirection. The mechanical contrivance that he says is not necessary to detail here was the device that he staked his entire career on, when he first announced his fistula “cure.” From 1849 to 1856, it was championed by many doctors, but as will be seen in later chapters, it was soon entirely abandoned, even by Sims himself.
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 238.
“…it was stuck.”
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 238.
“On the Treatment of Vesico-Vaginal Fistula,” J. Marion Sims, The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, Vol. XXIII, 1852, p. 77.
“…he laid hold of the string…”
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 238.
“Lecture on Vesico-Vaginal Fistula,” Pacific Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. XVIII, July 1875, No. 2, p. 56.
“The cursed women held one another…”
“…you might be punished for that too.”
Apart from stray references to the enslaved subjects being held down, there is little in Sims’s accounts to suggest that the women were ever threatened with violence if they protested to the experiments. But, of course, these are Sims’s accounts, written most often for a Northern, and abolitionist, audience. It’s possible, and perhaps even likely, that Sims or his assistants threatened or executed punishment if an experimental subject did not cooperate, or did not sufficiently stifle the effects of pain that even Sims described as extreme. As described above (see “Why did he need her to approve?”), I have chosen to portray Sims’s duplicitousness—and cruelty—in more psychological terms than physical ones, but, regardless, it is undeniable that any enslaved person would have it in mind that disobedience in any form might result in severe punishment.
“…Betsey bled but not as much…”
Once again, Sims has completely changed his narrative, first allowing that he used the sponge catheter twice, and then in his autobiography removing the detail entirely. I have chosen to believe the earlier version of events, and to suggest that after two dramatic failures Sims would once again have had to reassure his experimental subjects that the experiments would eventually succeed.
“On the Treatment of Vesico-Vaginal Fistula,” J. Marion Sims, The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, Vol. XXIII, 1852, p. 77.
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 239.
Sims, J. M., & New York Academy of Medicine. (1858). Silver sutures in surgery. New York: S.S. & W. Wood, pp. 53-54.
