Say Anarcha: A Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women’s Health

Journalist Hallman (B & Me) corrects a huge omission in women’s health history in this innovative and riveting study of Anarcha, an enslaved woman who in the mid-1800s endured as many as 30 unanesthetized experimental surgeries performed by the “father of modern gynecology,” J. Marion Sims. Casting a critical eye on Sims’s statements about Anarcha, including his claim that he “cured” her of obstetric fistula, “a horrific condition that is the result of prolonged obstructed labor,” Hallman recreates Anarcha’s life from plantation and census records, and fills in the substantial gaps by drawing on slave narratives compiled by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s. Mixing speculation and fact, he describes a young Anarcha becoming an assistant to an enslaved woman “who had been purchased for $175 to give medicines and catch babies”; her reappearance, more than a decade after the original surgeries, as a patient at Sims’s hospital in New York City; and her marriage to Lorenzo Jackson, an enslaved man in Virginia. Throughout, Hallman presents Sims as a “craven and conniving” physician who built his reputation by courting the press and touring Europe under the pretext of sharing his surgical knowledge while secretly spying for the Confederacy. Through rigorous and innovative research, Hallman successfully transforms Anarcha from historical object to subject, and shines a light on the contentious rise of medical ethics in the 19th century. It’s a must-read. Illus. (June)