Modern gynecology was founded on unanesthetized experimentation on enslaved women.

Evidence

In 1845, Alabama’s J. Marion Sims horrifically started experimenting on the vaginas of eleven enslaved women for a procedure to heal a complication of childbirth called vesicovaginal fistula. The procedures were “not painful enough to justify the trouble” of anesthesia, he said. It was a racist idea to justify his cruelty, not something Sims truly knew from his experiments. “Lucy’s agony was extreme,” Sims later noted in his memoir. After a marathon of surgeries into the early 1850s—one woman, Anarcha, suffered under his knife thirty times—Sims perfected the procedure for curing the fistula. Anesthesia in hand, Sims started healing White victims, moved to New York, built the first woman’s hospital, and fathered American gynecology. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 493

Categorization

• XREF: A second, brutal supporting exhibit for the reader’s core goal: Sims’s belief that Black women felt less pain is a racist idea produced to justify his cruelty, exactly the policy-first pattern.
• SEED: An essay angle: the ‘father of gynecology’ statue on Fifth Avenue as materialized racist memory—whose monuments we keep and whose pain they rewrite.