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“…trickle through a small hole…”
This begins to speak to what actually constitutes a “cure” in fistula surgery, a subject that is debated even today. “Improved” is a tricky category, too, and many of the early case reports from Woman’s Hospital indicate that women were not cured, but improved. Later in life, Sims would go on to claim many “cures,” when there was no follow-up examination, and no codified definition of a cure. But here Sims acknowledges that reducing the size of a fistulous opening did not amount to a marked change in the condition.
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, pp. 229, 241.
“…a cure was possible.”
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 239.
“…a stick of gum elastic…”
“On the Treatment of Vesico-Vaginal Fistula,” J. Marion Sims, The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, Vol. XXIII, 1852, pp. 77-78.
“…opened up again completely.”
See “Anarcha learned she had been sold…,” above. This is as close as Sims comes to acknowledging that progress he sometimes achieved was followed by setbacks—he does not offer a reason. Pregnancies would be a likely cause.
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 242.
“…when six months passed…”
All of Sims’s accounts of the fistula experiments hurry past the details, and subsequent commentators tended to follow Sims’s lead in focusing on the effect of the surgeries on Sims himself, rather than his experimental subjects. Sims’s vagueness on this count is why his assistant, Nathan Bozeman, chastised his former mentor for never detailing the experiments, criticizing him even shortly after he died for never providing a detailed account—which will be described later in the book.
There is, of course, no account of what Sims told the enslaved women or their enslavers when his own deadline of six months’ time came and went.
Sims, J. M., & New York Academy of Medicine. (1858). Silver sutures in surgery. New York: S.S. & W. Wood, p. 54.
“…fewer white doctors came to watch.”
Sims, J. M., & New York Academy of Medicine. (1858). Silver sutures in surgery. New York: S.S. & W. Wood, p. 54.
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, pp. 241-42.
“…it was never pleasant or delightful…”
Although Sims enthusiastically championed the use of opium to constipate the bowels of his enslaved experimental subjects, he later abandoned the use of opium for this purpose and spoke of the dangers of women becoming addicted to the drug. It’s probably correct, as L. Lewis Wall has argued, that Sims did not deliberately addict Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy, and the others to opium. However, an addiction would likely have made their cooperation far more likely, and Sims ignored the dangers of the drug until he was performing operations and experiments on white women and Irish immigrants.
“Lecture on Vesico-Vaginal Fistula,” Pacific Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. XVIII, July 1875, No. 2, p. 61.
“At night, they talked.”
Sims’s claims that the enslaved women willingly participated in the experiments and begged him for additional operations are so preposterous I won’t reproduce them here. It’s tacitly false, on their face—enslaved persons cannot provide informed consent—and having seen fistula surgery first hand in Africa, I find it hard to believe that any woman would clamor or beg to be experimented on, without anesthesia, when there was little hope of success. Nevertheless, obstetric fistula is horror that is impossible to overstate, and this passage is an attempt to render the various possible motives—including opium addiction—that the women would have had for enduring (without consent) the procedures, and for eventually becoming Sims’s nurses and assistants. The women were not willing participants, but they would have had motives—sadly desperate motives—for seeking a cure. Sims was only too eager to play on these motives, and benefit from them.