Chilling Details About The Father Of Gynecology

A great deal of medical knowledge has historically been amassed through the exploitation of vulnerable people. American doctors learned about STDs through experimenting on imprisoned people and people in psychiatric hospitals in Guatemala and Swedish dentists learned about tooth decay by experimenting on people with intellectual and developmental disabilities at the Vipeholm Mental Institution.

During the period of enslavement in the United States, this was no different, and doctors frequently used enslaved people for their human experimentation. This was largely the case in the field of gynecology, especially after the transatlantic trade of enslaved people ended.

As a result, one man has gone down in history as the Father of Gynecology for the tools and surgical procedures he invented, but these inventions were all at the expense of enslaved Black women, who couldn't consent to or refuse his forced experimentation. And because enslaved people had few options for medical care available, they were often forced to succumb to the forced experimentation. These are some chilling details about the "Father of Gynecology."

At his clinic, Sims used enslaved Black people both as workers and for human experimentation. Tragically, few survived the experimentation. According to "Medical Apartheid" by Harriet A. Washington, at least four enslaved people died after being surgically operated on by Sims, including one 19-year-old enslaved person who had bone segments removed without any anesthetic.

Another enslaved person almost suffocated after Sims left a sponge from his mouth after removing part of his cancerous jaw, while another almost bled to death after Sims failed to staunch the bleeding from the carotid artery. Sims also reportedly glossed over the details of his mistakes or patients' deaths upon writing up the case studies and instead "dwelled[ed] upon technical details of greater interest to his medical readers."

In "When Doctors Kill," Joshua A. Perper and Stephen J. Cina write that Sims also experimented on infants born to enslaved Black mothers. Sims believed that the movement of the skull bones during birth led to lockjaw, which is now known to be an early symptom of neonatal tetanus. Hampton University writes that Sims attempted to remedy the lockjaw suffered by infants by "pry[ing] the bones of their skulls into proper alignment" with a shoemaker's awl.

This attempt was based on the myth that "the bones of black infants' skulls, unlike white infants', grew together quickly, leaving the brain no space to grow or develop." And when the babies died as a result, Sims would blame their Black mothers and the Black midwives.

Sims's first vesico-vaginal fistula operation was on an enslaved woman named Lucy shortly after he created the first speculum. According to Women & The American Story, Sims reportedly invited other doctors to watch the operation and the operating room was packed with twelve other doctors, despite the fact that Lucy wasn't asked whether or not she'd be comfortable with an audience. Lucy was brought into the room naked and positioned on her hands and knees. She was also restrained during the operation, which was done without any anesthesia. Later in his memoirs, Sims would write that through the use of the speculum, "I saw everything as no man had ever seen before," per Harper's Magazine.

According to the Journal of Medical Ethics, the operation lasted one hour and although the larger fistula was repaired, two fistula remained. Because Sims used a sponge to drain urine away from her bladder, Lucy became sick with blood-poisoning and almost died after the operation. It ended up taking Lucy almost three months to completely recover. The Conversation writes that Sims himself acknowledged that the use of the sponge was "a very stupid thing for me to do."

When experimenting on enslaved Black women, Sims never used any form of anesthesia, which meant that they were conscious throughout every fistula operation. While some accounts write that the lack of anesthesia was due to the fact that doctors feared that people might die from it, this claim seems less credible when one considers that Sims later started anesthesia for fistula surgeries for white women, because "none of them, due to the pain, were able to endure a single operation," according to the Journal of Medical Ethics.

In addition, "Medical Apartheid" confirms that in the 1860s, Sims had no qualms about administering ether to white women, who suffered from vaginismus, which made it impossible to have sex, in order to "rende[r] them unconscious so that their husbands could have sex with them."

The operations were reportedly so painful for the dozen enslaved Black women that the doctors who initially assisted Sims with the surgeries ended up leaving within a year, unable to bear "the bone-chilling shrieks of the women." As a result, the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology writes that the enslaved women subjected to the surgeries also ended up being trained as surgical nurses as they were forced to assist with the operations as well.

Although Sims spent almost five years experimenting on enslaved Black women, he was less than forthcoming about these experiments when he finally published his findings. According to "Medical Apartheid," while Sims lived in Alabama and the South, he defended the system of enslavement and frequently used slurs in his writings. But once he moved up north to New York City, he started lying about the ethnicity of his experimental patients and in the illustrations accompanying his reports, the women were depicted as white. As an additional insult to injury, the illustrated women are covered and allowed a sense of privacy that neither Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, nor the other enslaved women were afforded.

Sims also praised the courage of these women in his accounts without mentioning that "it was chattel slavery and morphine, not courage, that had bound the women to his surgical table."

Women & The American Story also notes that in his 1852 article that outlined the surgical procedure for treating fistulas, Sims never even mentions that the women he was operating on were enslaved. "He also never mentioned that the enslaved women became skilled medical practitioners."

After the Civil War began in 1861, Sims moved to Europe and stayed there for the duration of the war, returning in 1868. However, although Sims' travels have been attributed to his medical practice or for his own health, per "Human Medical Experimentation," there's evidence to suggest that Sims was actually in Europe as a Confederate agent. According to the Montgomery Advisor, during his travels, Sims was already on the radar of Henry Shelton Sanford, known as Lincoln's Spymaster, who was responsible for coordinating the early surveillance of Confederate agents in Europe. In one incident, there's even evidence to suggest that Sims was responsible for stealing an official passport seal in Belgium. Meanwhile, there's little writing about Sims' time in Belgium, other than the fact that he performed "three surgeries in a single morning, and though one of his patients died, a banquet was thrown in his honor."

After Sims was called to act as a physician for Empress Eugenie, the wife of Emperor Napoleon III, she was described as becoming an "ardent apostle" for the Confederacy. While France never joined the American Civil War, Napoleon III did give permission for Confederate ships to dock at Brest and Cherbourg after meeting Sims. Although Empress Eugenie is one of the most famous of Sims' patients, "it was never revealed what Eugenie's condition was, and given the context it seems possible that Napoleon needed Sims for clandestine communication with the South."

While the story of what happened to Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, and the other enslaved Black people experimented on by Sims is horrific, at the time forced experimentation was the only standard of care afforded to enslaved people, especially in the realm of gynecology. According to "Medical Apartheid," the method of cesarean sections was perfected by a Louisiana surgeon named Dr. François Marie Prévost after experimenting on numerous enslaved Black women. Dr. Ephraim McDowell, a contemporary of Prévost who was the first person to perform a successful ovariotomy, also experimented on several enslaved Black women before this surgery was perfected. Virginia's Dr. P.C. Spencer is also known for inventing a surgical procedure for bladder stones that was created after surgically experimenting on enslaved people.

The Washington Post notes that not only was the entire American medical system created through the exploitation of enslaved Black people, but this racist history can still be seen in the 21st century in how Black patients are treated by doctors. This is especially true of the field of gynecology, since after the federal ban on importing enslaved people in 1808, the economic incentives behind promoting the births of health enslaved children pushed medical innovation.