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Feb 17, 2020 · Berkeley News spoke with Cooper Owens about the conflicting roles enslaved black women played in the growth of this field and how her work is helping to inform contemporary doctors and nurses about the origins of medical racism today. Cooper Owens will speak from 12 to 1:30 p.m. this Friday, Feb. 21, in Sutardja Dai Hall’s Banatao Auditorium.
- Roots in The Market For Enslaved People
- But Did His Enslaved Patients consent?
- Experimenting on Enslaved Children
- Statues Have Prompted Protest
Born in Lancaster County, South Carolina in 1813, James Marion Sims entered the medical profession when doctors didn’t undergo the same rigorous coursework and training they do today. After interning with a doctor, taking a three-month course and studying for a year at Jefferson Medical College, Sims began his practice in Lancaster. He later reloca...
Sims wrote that the women had “clamored” for the operations to relieve their discomfort—but whether they consented or not was never captured in any other historical record. As Bettina Judd, assistant professor of gender, women and sexuality studies at the University of Washington, points out, consent isn’t always about “whether you can say yes; it’...
Writer and medical ethicist Harriet Washington says Sims’s racist beliefs affected more than his gynecological experiments. Before and after his gynecological experiments, he also tested surgical treatments on enslaved Black children in an effort to treat “trismus nascentium” (neonatal tetanus)—with little to no success. Sims also believed that Afr...
J. Marion Sims continues to loom large in the medical field, celebrated as a medical trailblazer. Statues were erected to him in, among other places, New York City's Central Park, the South Carolina statehouse and outside his old medical school, Jefferson University, in Philadelphia. After several years of activism, the Philadelphia statue was move...
Apr 18, 2018 · Celebrated as the “father of modern gynecology,” Sims practiced the surgical techniques that made him famous on enslaved women: Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, and the unknown others. He performed 30 ...
Jun 4, 2018 · Doctors must grapple with this racist history to improve our medical care. ... In addition to their status as enslaved people, black women were considered appropriate subjects for such experiments ...
May 11, 2022 · For five years in the late 1840s, Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy and other unnamed enslaved women suffered at the hands of a white doctor who performed painful surgeries on the women without anesthesia ...
Aug 14, 2019 · Myths about physical racial differences were used to justify slavery — and are still believed by doctors today. By Linda Villarosa AUG. 14, 2019. The excruciatingly painful medical experiments ...
Sims chose almost exclusively Black enslaved women as his research subjects. I spoke with Dr. Deirdre Cooper-Owens, author of "Medical Bondage," who explained the historical context.
