J. Marion Sims was a 19th-century American physician who came to be celebrated as the “father of modern gynecology.” But behind his medical legacy lies a deeply disturbing truth. Sims built his reputation by experimenting on enslaved Black women without their consent and without anesthesia, driven by the belief that their bodies could endure pain more than those of white women.
James Marion Sims was born in 1813 in Lancaster County, South Carolina, into a world built on slavery and racial hierarchy. He studied medicine at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, graduating in 1835 with limited surgical training and little to distinguish him from other young physicians of his time.
Early in his career, Sims returned to the South and began practicing in Alabama, where he encountered a high number of cases involving enslaved women suffering from childbirth-related injuries. These women, legally considered property, became the foundation of his medical experiments.
Between 1845 and 1849, Lacking access to hospitals, J. Marion Sims operated a private clinic in his Montgomery backyard. It was the first known hospital dedicated specifically to black women, not out of compassion, but because Sims needed human subjects for his experiments in gynecological surgery. He was focused on treating vesico-vaginal and recto-vaginal fistulas, conditions that caused painful and humiliating leakage in women after traumatic childbirth.
His “patients” were enslaved women whose owners brought them to Sims as a last-ditch effort to salvage their “value.” Among them were three women whose names we know: Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsy.
The names of this women, are etched in history not because they volunteered, but because they were experimented on over and over again, without anesthesia, as Sims believed that Black women could withstand pain differently than whites.
Sims operated on Anarcha over 30 times before claiming success. He used a silver wire suture, a technique that would later be celebrated in medical circles, but its origin lies in the torn flesh of women who could neither consent nor resist.
The procedures were often botched, the silver sutures infected, and the women left to suffer and heal in unsanitary conditions.
Enslaved Africans were seen as property. That meant their health, or lack thereof, was an investment concern. Slave owners came to Sims to preserve that investment. If a woman could no longer bear children due to complications from childbirth, she lost value. Sims’ work was intended to restore that value, not for the sake of the women’s well-being, but for their owners’ profit.
This system transformed enslaved Black bodies into raw material for medical innovation. Sims wasn’t alone in this. Southern medical schools boasted about their access to enslaved cadavers for dissection. Black bodies were used not only in life but in death, dissected, displayed, and discussed as case studies in front of classrooms of young white men.
The physician-slave-owner-slave triad created a twisted version of the doctor-patient relationship. The enslaved person had no say. They were voiceless, deemed “medically incompetent,” and their bodies became arenas of experimentation.
Sims’ experiments weren’t limited to women. In one chilling case, a man named Sam was brought to Sims with a suspected gumboil, possibly linked to syphilis treatment. Another doctor had attempted surgery, but Sam had leapt from the chair in pain, refusing to go further. Sims, determined not to be “foiled,” restrained Sam and operated anyway. Over forty minutes, he extracted a tooth, sawed into Sam’s jawbone with increasingly brutal tools, including a chain saw, until he removed the “diseased” bone. Sam had no say in what happened to his body.
Sims’ private hospital gave him a platform. His experiments and techniques earned him national recognition. He would later go on to found the Women’s Hospital in New York, where he performed surgeries mostly on white women, and often with the use of anesthesia, unlike his earlier experiments on enslaved Black women in Alabama.
He would eventually lead prestigious medical associations, cementing his reputation in the field. But the foundation of his success was built on the agony of the enslaved, people denied the basic dignity of consent or pain relief.
Medical infirmaries like Sims’ thrived in the Southern economy because they served two purposes: to generate profit from slavery and to advance medical science, but only for the benefit of whites. The suffering of Black bodies was deemed a necessary cost.
For over a century, Sims was honored with statues and medical accolades. Only in recent years has the medical community begun to reckon with his true legacy. In 2018, New York City removed his statue from Central Park. But the shadow of his work still lingers in modern medicine, where Black women continue to face disproportionate rates of maternal mortality and are less likely to be believed when they report pain.
Sources:
https://blogs.jpmsonline.com/2014/11/29/how-we-got-this-far-remembering-the-horrifying-medical-experiments-of-the-past/
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/04/j-marion-sims/558248/
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/17/603163394/-father-of-gynecology-who-experimented-on-slaves-no-longer-on-pedestal-in-nyc
