[ID: Anarcha was a Black teenage girl enslaved in Alabama. She became one of the most experimented-on people in U.S. history, cut open more than 30 times without anesthesia. Why? To develop surgeries for a condition that white women were beginning to experience. This is her story.
Image of black woman kneeling on a table, with three well-dressed white men standing around her. The area has a white sheet pulled around it, and two other black women are peeking around it.
After a long and traumatic labor, Anarcha developed vaginal and rectal fistulas -- tears between the birth canal and her bladder and rectum. This caused constant leakage of urine and feces, leaving her in pain, ashamed, and isolated. Sims saw her condition not as a tragedy, but as an opportunity. He believed she was the perfect subject to test surgical procedures he hoped to one day use on white women.
But Sims wasn't trying to heal Anarcha for her own sake. He was trying to cure fistulas because white women were experiencing them too. He used Anarcha to test and refine his techniques, without her consent, and without pain relief.
Sims refused to give her anesthesia, claiming Black people didn't feel pain like white people. He operated while she was fully awake and restrained. She cried out in agony. He recorded her reactions but didn't stop.
Once he perfected the surgery on Anarcha, Sims began treating white women -- this time with anesthesia and care. They got the benefits. Anarcha was discarded. Her pain built a legacy she would never be credited for.
Anarcha wasn't alone. Two other enslaved women, Lucy and Betsey, were also operated on without anesthesia. Lucy nearly died from infection. Sims used them over and over, turning their bodies into test sites for procedures that white women would later rely on.
Same image from above, but with the two black women peeking around the sheet circled in red.
Sims became known as the "father of modern gynecology." He opened the first women's hospital in the U.S., received international praise, and had statues built in his honor. Meanwhile, Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey were never named, never thanked, and never honored.
Image of statue of "J. MARION SIMS M.D. L.L.D."
For more than a century, they were left out of history. Their names weren't in medical textbooks. Their suffering was hidden behind Sims' success. The pain of Black women was used, but never acknowledged.
Today, that's changing. In 2021, artist Michelle Browder unveiled a monument in Montgomery, Alabama, honoring Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey -- calling them the Mothers of Gynecology. It stands near the place where they were experimented on.
Image of sculptures of the three black women, made elaborately of metal, and the center figure having a hole where her womb would be.
Anarcha was a young girl whose pain helped build a medical field that erased her. Her body was used to develop treatments that would go on to help white women and the rest of the world while she was left behind in history. She was a victim of exploitation -- and she IS the foundation of modern gynecology.]
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2087
