Modern American gynecology advanced through repeated surgical experimentation on an enslaved teenager. Her name was Anarcha.
In the 1840s, in Alabama, a seventeen-year-old enslaved Black girl endured approximately thirty surgical operations at the hands of physician J. Marion Sims.
No anesthesia.
No legal autonomy.
No right to refuse.
Her body became the site through which Sims developed a surgical technique to repair vesicovaginal fistulas — a devastating childbirth injury that causes chronic incontinence and infection. That breakthrough would later earn him the title “father of modern gynecology.”
For more than a century, his name was celebrated.
Hers was barely spoken.
Who She Was
Anarcha was not a symbol. She was not a rhetorical device. She was a teenager who survived childbirth and was left with a severe injury. Vesicovaginal fistulas were common in the 19th century and socially isolating. Women who suffered from them were often abandoned or hidden away.
For enslaved women, the stakes were harsher. Their reproductive capacity was tied to economic value. Their bodies were legally owned.
Sims began operating on Anarcha around 1845. Other enslaved women — most commonly identified as Lucy and Betsey — were also subjected to repeated surgeries as he refined his technique.
The procedures were invasive. They were experimental. They were performed in a makeshift hospital on a plantation.
Anarcha underwent operation after operation until Sims perfected his method.
The Surgeries
Historical records indicate that Anarcha endured approximately thirty procedures before a successful repair was achieved.
Ether anesthesia was publicly demonstrated in 1846. Sims’ early operations began before that year. He continued operating afterward. When he later moved to New York and began treating white women, anesthesia was used.
The distinction matters.
Regardless of debates over availability, the defining fact remains: enslaved women could not consent in any meaningful legal or social sense. Their participation was embedded in a system that denied them bodily autonomy.
Medical progress occurred.
So did coercion.
Both truths stand.
The Breakthrough
Sims developed the use of silver sutures and surgical positioning techniques that dramatically improved fistula repair outcomes. His methods were adopted internationally. He founded the Woman’s Hospital of the State of New York and became a prominent medical figure.
The advancement was real.
So was the cost.
Modern gynecology did not emerge from a vacuum. It emerged through trial, repetition, and experimentation — in this case, on the bodies of enslaved Black teenagers.
That is historical fact.
The Pattern
Anarcha’s story is not an anomaly. Enslaved people in the United States were frequently used in medical experimentation throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Their legal status as property made their bodies accessible to physicians seeking surgical advancement.
Later abuses would follow similar patterns — from forced sterilizations to the Tuskegee syphilis study. When a population is denied full personhood, ethical guardrails erode.
Anarcha stands at the center of that early chapter in American medical history.
Reclaiming the Record
For generations, J. Marion Sims was memorialized in statues and textbooks. In 2018, his Central Park statue was removed after sustained public pressure. The removal did not erase medical history. It expanded it.
History had honored the surgeon.
It had ignored the patient.
Naming Anarcha does not negate surgical progress. It completes the record.
Medical ethics today are built on principles of informed consent, patient autonomy, and institutional review. Those principles exist because history demonstrated what happens in their absence.
Anarcha’s story is not about retroactive outrage. It is about clarity.
Scientific advancement and systemic injustice coexisted.
One does not cancel the other.
What Leadership Looks Like Now
The point is not to flatten history into villain and victim. The point is to refuse erasure.
Anarcha endured repeated invasive surgeries that shaped American gynecology. She did so without the power to refuse. That reality deserves acknowledgment without dilution.
She was not a footnote in someone else’s achievement.
She was a human being whose suffering altered medical practice.
Her name belongs in the record.
And it belongs there without apology.
Anarcha does not need pity. She needs accuracy. She needs to be remembered not as a backdrop to someone else’s brilliance, but as a human being whose body carried the weight of a medical breakthrough. Telling her story is not about rewriting history to feel better — it is about refusing to sanitize it. If medicine today is built on consent and dignity, then it must also have the courage to name the moments when those principles were denied. That is not condemnation. It is accountability. And accountability is the foundation of trust.
The Humane Herald 