New Poetry Collection Addresses Historic Wrongs by BWW News Desk
- November 14, 2018 Between 1845 and 1849, the inventor of the speculum, James Marion Sims, experimented on enslaved women at his makeshift hospital in Mt. Meigs, Alabama, in his quest to conduct groundbreaking work in the field of gynecology. In his autobiography, The Story of My Life, Sims provides the names of only three of the at least eleven women he spent years conducting countless surgeries on—Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. These mothers were subjected to his experimentations in hopes of being cured from fistula (severe vaginal tears) suffered during difficult childbirth—without anesthesia, without the ability to consent, and without a voice of their own. Until now.