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“Sims quickly opted for the forceps…”
There is some speculation here, but the scene is delivered largely as Sims described it. His account does not specify whether the child lived or died—and he would have had little motive to be concerned one way or the other. My description is intended to render Sims’s ongoing aversion to women’s medicine—and this doesn’t change until he realizes how he might be able to secure honor and wealth for himself by curing fistula.
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 227.
“…the slave girl’s name—Anarcky.”
Sims does not specify when he learned the name of the girl upon whom he performed the forceps delivery, but his autobiography states that he used the name when he visited the Westcott plantation again, a few days later. At no point does Sims explicitly state that the Anarcha of the delivery is the same as the girl who once cared for him—but nor does he note that he had encountered two enslaved women, the same age, with the same odd name, in medical contexts. It’s the kind of non-essential detail that in other papers he was quick to indicate.
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 227.
“Henry returned to his office…”
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 227.
“The look in Henry’s eye…”
Circumstances do mitigate against Sims’s use of forceps being the cause of Anarcha’s fistulae. Had her wounds been a “tear” in this way, she would have begun leaking immediately—instead, several days passed, at least in Sims’s retelling of it. Nevertheless, even Sims’s hagiographic biographer took note of the fact that others around him suspected forceps as the culprit.
Harris, S. (1950). Woman's surgeon: The life story of J. Marion Sims. New York: Macmillan, p. 90.
“…back to the Westcott plantation.”
Sims does not specify that Henry went with him, but Henry was the plantation doctor.
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 227.
“The girl held his eye…”
As described above, I believe that a later document—when Anarcha is working at Montgomery Hall—reveals that Sims has realized that the Anarcha he has performed the forceps delivery on is the same as the girl who once cared for him. Sims does not specify when he made this realization, and my rendering of this—and of Sims and Anarcha’s dynamic, in general—is a way of characterizing what was most certainly a relationship fraught by many emotions.
“…the source of the mischief…”
See “…back to the Westcott plantation,” above.
Sims has not yet conceive of the so-called “Sims position”—really just the genu-pectoral position he learned about in school—so it’s likely that he would have been using a lithotomy position here. His description here also makes it unclear whether Anarcha has one fistula or two. He was consistently duplicitous in this regard, and it speaks to many unanswerable questions about the Alabama fistula experiments. Why would Sims work so hard on an extremely difficult case in his first attempt to cure a fistula? Why not attempt an easier one? Some commentators have said that Sims must have cured both of Anarcha’s fistula before claiming a cure, and others suggest that what sounds like two fistulae is really one large one. Sims’s later descriptions appear later in the book.