Page 275

“…an opportunity for further experiment.”

As already noted above (See “Anarcha was improved…” and “…discharged as cured…,” above), there is ample reason to doubt the Woman’s Hospital case record of Sims’s subsequent experimentation on Anarcha. He claims once again to have cured her, but later chapters will document the fact that Anarcha remained uncured. I believe that what is most likely is that Sims would not have even attempted to cure her fistulae at this point. There had been far too many surgeries. A number of facts align with this theory. The woman sent to him by Josiah Nott arrived in December 1856, at precisely the same time Anarcha was in Woman’s Hospital. He goes on to say that he performed this precise operation only twice more, presumably not long after. He does not say upon whom. Nevertheless, he will go on to modify this procedure, and employ it in Paris. As will be seen shortly, Sims drew a sharp distinction between women of high class, who were not appropriate subjects for surgical experimentation, and women who could be experimented on with impunity. When the case sent by Nott fired him with inspiration, it would be natural for him to see Anarcha as appropriate material for yet additional experiments—and furthermore, as he himself said that this procedure would have resembled his work on fistula, it would have been easy for him to disguise it in the case record as a successful fistula repair.

Sims, J. M. (1990). Silver sutures in surgery; together with Clinical notes on uterine surgery. Birmingham, Ala: Classics of Obstetrics & Gynecology Library, p. 255.