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“…blindly sanctioning his procedure.”
This is Dr. Alexander Stevens, who will play a greater role later in future chapters.
Emmet, T. A., & Woman's Hospital (New York, N.Y.). (1893). Reminiscences of the founders of the Woman's Hospital Association. New York: Stuyvesant Press, p. 1. First printed in the New York Journal of Gynaecology and Obstetrics.
“…more difficult to perform?”
Pope praises Sims, but the implication is that Sims’s method is useful for only small, simple fistulae. Pope also abandoned the use of Sims’s catheter.
“Case of Vesico-Vaginal Fistula—Cure,” Charles Pope, St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 12, p. 403.
“He approached Anarcha…”
There is no direct evidence of Anarcha and Emmet interacting at Emmet’s wedding. However, Anarcha was owned by Nathan Harris at the time that Emmet was married to Harris’s sister-in-law at Harris’s home in Autauga County. In addition, Emmet’s name appears on later Harris estate documents on which Anarcha’s name also appears. By February 1854, Emmet had already encountered Sims and in addition to learning of Anarcha from his fiancé (see “Catherine had known Sims…,” above), he likely would have read Sims’s 1852 VVF paper, which was read widely around the city, and he certainly would have heard rumors of Sims’s precipitous rise through the ranks of New York medical circles. It’s not a stretch to suggest that Emmet would have had an interest in Sims’s first experimental subject, or that he might have seen it as an opportunity to endear himself to a figure whose status was rising in the city where he was attempting to make a living.
Materials from the Harris estate are held at the Montgomery County Archives in Montgomery, Alabama.
“…she looked much older…”
The details of Emmet’s exchange with Anarcha are speculative, of course, but generally in keeping with what is established by the record. By Sims’s own account, Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey had become skilled assistants, and Anarcha later worked as a midwife. Emmet would have been surprised by her knowledge both because she was more than a “granny,” and because it was widely considered inappropriate in the South to provide enslaved persons with too much practical knowledge.
In addition, I am suggesting here that Anarcha looked older than she was. This is in keeping with several documents in the Harris plantation materials, which misstate her age, and the fact that many fistula sufferers afflicted with comorbidities—like Zewditu in the “Joy Village” section of the afterword—appear much older than they are.
“…a tour of the South…”
Emmet’s description of his wedding journey stretches across several pages. He claims that they left “that night,” but I doubt that after a three-day train journey, with only a single night before his wedding, that they would have left immediately on the night of his wedding day. (Furthermore, Emmet was frequently loose with facts.)
Emmet, T. A. (1911). Incidents of my life: Professional, literary, social; with services in the cause of Ireland. New York, Putnam, p. 159.
“…to write a letter to Dr. Sims.”
See “…the plantation’s doctor woman…,” above. There is no surviving letter from Emmet to Sims, or a return telegram from Sims to Emmet. However, this scene offers a likely explanation for what is irrefutable in the record—Anarcha was experimented on, again, by Charles Bell Gibson in Richmond at the Egyptian Building (see “…Egyptian Building,...” above), and Sims was aware of it. As will be documented later, Charles Bell Gibson attended the 1852 meeting of the American Medical Association where Sims was speaking to others about his fistula cure, and Gibson went on to be the first to publish an account of attempting Sims’s procedure after Sims’s 1852 paper appeared. It makes perfect sense that Sims, on hearing that Anarcha was not cured—and that rumors of her condition might make it back to New York, where he was attempting to make a name for himself—would steer Anarcha toward the only other doctor he was aware of who was attempting his procedure.