So I called on those materials to give a sense of breath and life to Anarcha's story. And these are thousands - the voices of thousands of formerly enslaved persons that offer just an absolute treasure trove of details. And so in order to complete that portrait of her, I called on the "Slave Narratives" of the Federal Writers' Project, which was part of the Works Progress Administration of FDR. HALLMAN: Because Anarcha was a kind of void, there really had to be a different kind of history that needed to be created in order to tell her story. MARTIN: I'm just curious about how you went about capturing the lives of women who couldn't write their own stories. And so there is a clinical advance that came out of the Alabama fistula experiments, but it owes nothing to Sims. And that is the thing that is changing lives today in Africa. And what happened is that a kind of patient-centered model of care was pioneered. Sims had gathered these women together, had them living with one another in order to experiment on them. And you're learning to care for one another.Īnd this idea traces all the way back to these original experiments that happened in Montgomery, Ala. What happens when you're a fistula sufferer is that you are living with women who have a similar condition. HALLMAN: What's happening today in Africa, where this condition that Anarcha and Lucy and Betsey and the others suffered from, obstetric fistula, this is still a crisis in the developing world. MARTIN: Tell us a little bit more about why you say she was so consequential to these techniques and to the development of patient-centered medicine. And so when I heard about that, I thought, well, can she be found? I was able to find out a lot more about this young woman who made this very significant contribution to the history of medicine, but then was largely forgotten by history. He was a very, very untrustworthy source. And for a long time, all that anybody knew about Anarcha, who was the most consequential of these experimental subjects, came from Sims himself. And she and two other women, Lucy and Betsy, and approximately seven others were the experimental subjects of J. HALLMAN: So Anarcha is a central figure in the creation story of modern women's health. MARTIN: Your book is titled "Say Anarcha." And I assume that that's a reference to the rallying cry that we have heard in recent years of demonstrators who want us to acknowledge people who have been unacknowledged so far. JC HALLMAN: Thanks so much for having me. And he's here with us now to tell us more about his new book, "Say Anarcha." J.C. Hallman calls her one of the mothers of modern gynecology. Hallman has gone a step further and restored the women in the picture to their rightful place at the center of the story, especially one woman, Anarcha. City removed that statue in 2018, but now writer J.C. Marion Sims was a surgeon who, beginning in the 1840s, began developing surgical instruments and techniques that helped women survive difficult conditions related to childbirth, especially fistulas.īut what you might not have noticed in the picture or even known existed, were the enslaved Black women on whom Sims experimented, often without anesthesia. You might have seen the statue in New York's Central Park or even that famous illustration in one textbook or another - a white man, one or both arms crossing his chest in that classic pose, celebrating the man known as the father of modern gynecology.
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