Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy and the Price of Gynecology

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

James Marion Sims is remembered in most medical histories as the father of modern gynecology, the surgeon who in the 1840s perfected a repair for vesicovaginal fistula, a devastating and then untreatable complication of childbirth. What is less often told alongside that achievement is how the technique was developed. Working in Montgomery, Alabama, Sims operated on enslaved women who had no power to refuse, most famously a woman named Anarcha, on whom he performed roughly thirty operations, without anesthesia, before he considered the repair perfected. Two other enslaved women, Betsey and Lucy, are also named in the surviving record. Anesthesia existed by the later years of this work, but Sims did not use it on these patients, a choice historians read against the era's racist medical belief that Black patients felt pain differently. The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, in its own education materials, poses the question plainly: if Sims is the father of modern gynecology, are Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy not its mothers. The Medicine Atlas records this as a documented historiographical dissent, not a settled verdict, because the historical record supports both the fact of Sims's surgical achievement and the fact of how it was obtained, and a reader deserves both.