Born: Unknown (1800s), United States (assumed)
Died: Unknown (1800s)
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Indeed, it often seems that we’re more likely to see statues of men who committed atrocities than we are of women. A statue of James Marion Sims stood in New York City’s Central Park for more than 120 years (1894—2018), despite the well-documented fact that he horrifically tortured enslaved women, including Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy, and nine women whose names were never even recorded by their tormentor. It was only in 2022 that these women were given their own monument, a statute in Montgomery, Alabama—only about a mile from where a statue of him still stands in front of the Alabama State Capitol. In the 1840s, he experimented on women for years, performing major surgeries without anaesthesia as the women were restrained and observed by other curious white men. Anarcha alone was forced to undergo at least 30 surgeries. Horrifically, after his white male assistants quit, he trained the women to replace them, forcing them to assist with surgeries on each other.
According to the New York Historical Society,
“Lucy was the first of the three women to undergo Sims’s experimental operation. The operating room was packed with doctors who wanted to watch the procedure. She was not asked whether she was comfortable with strange men watching her operation. Lucy was brought to the operating room naked and restrained on the table so her involuntary movements during surgery would not disrupt the procedure. Sims did not use anesthesia to numb her pain. This was partly because doctors feared patients could die from anesthesia and partly because it was commonly believed that Black women did not experience pain the same way white women did. Lucy’s surgery took about an hour, and she was conscious for every minute of it.
After the surgery, Lucy developed a terrible infection from a device Sims had placed in her bladder. She experienced days of extreme agony. Sims was able to cure her infection, but her injury did not heal. The operation was a failure.”