J. Marion Sims experiments on enslaved women

Between roughly 1845 and 1849 in Alabama, the surgeon J. Marion Sims developed a surgical repair for vesicovaginal fistula by operating again and again on enslaved women who could not refuse. He performed some thirty operations on a woman known as Anarcha alone, and experimented on others recorded only as Betsey and Lucy — all without anesthesia, even as ether came into use, on the racist assumption that Black people felt less pain. Hailed for decades as the "father of modern gynecology," Sims is now a central figure in the history of medical exploitation: his advances were built on the bodies of women who were experimented upon precisely because they were property. Their names are increasingly honored in his place.