CHAPTER SIX — PAIN

[The Anarcha Archive is a series of short essays about the sources for Say Anarcha. A great deal more about the sources can be found at AnarchaArchive.com.]

In our last essay, we talked about two of the most controversial aspects of the Sims story, consent and anesthesia. Today, we’ll talk about another contentious point — pain.

Before I dive in, I want to make something clear. J. Marion Sims, the so-called “father of gynecology,” was a bad guy. He’s really bad. He’s so bad that what my work has done — digging forensically into all of the original primary sources, and the secondary sources as well — is reveal that he is even worse than what some of his fiercest critics have suggested.

That’s hard to believe — but it’s true. And it takes some explaining to get to why it’s true.

And the question of pain is maybe the best example of how this story gets thorny and complicated, really quick.

Although Sims was heavily criticized in his own time, the voices of his critics were mostly drowned out by doctors and biographers who heralded him. They called him a “savior of women,” and he was even once likened a to a godly figure. That was mostly in the first half of the twentieth century.

The real criticism of Sims began in the late 1960s, and a string of books, by G.J. Barker-Benfield, Deborah Kuhn McGregor, Harriet Washington, and Deirdre Cooper Owens, brought attention to a legacy that had mostly gone neglected.

But it wasn’t until 2017, shortly after the white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, that groups in New York — groups that had been protesting Sims’s Central Park monument for more than a decade — staged another protest at the site of the statue. This time, this image from the protest went viral, and very soon it seemed that the whole world had heard of J. Marion Sims.

This image, when it first appeared, was captioned “Black Women Don’t Feel Pain,” as though it was a quotation from Sims.

The problem is, it wasn’t.

Now please remember what I said earlier — the real truth about Sims is even worse than what his critics have claimed. That’s still true.

And yes, by all means, there was a widespread belief that black women felt less pain than white women, and it’s even very likely that Sims believed this, in some form or another. We’re still living with this today. In 2020, Dr. Susan Moore of Ohio, hospitalized for Covid, was denied pain medication that she told her doctor she needed. Dr. Moore reported that she was made to feel like a drug addict.

And, to be clear, Susan Moore was a medical doctor. And she died of Covid. The belief that black women don’t feel pain is not just a relic of the past — it still lingers today.

Now, in the practice of history and biography, it’s generally held that in the absence of any other evidence, it’s okay to ascribe to a historical figure a belief that was widely held at the time. That would seem, on the surface, to be what’s happening here: this was a widely held belief, and Sims probably believed it. So, in the absence of other evidence, it’s okay to say he believed it.

Maybe it would even be okay to say that he said it.

The problem is, we have access to a great deal of what Sims said, both publicly, and his private correspondence. And, as far as a direct quote goes, he never actually said it. I can’t show you here everything he wrote, but I read Sims comprehensively — more than anyone has ever found of his work — and it’s just not there.

Not only that, but Sims did describe the pain that was experienced by the women he was experimenting on. He said that Lucy suffered extreme agony as a result of his first experiment, and he described Anarcha’s life as one of suffering and disgust.

So Sims knew only too well that black women could feel pain. He saw it, first-hand.

And here’s the thing — he performed his experiments anyway, without the use of anesthesia.

Rather than saying “Black women don’t feel pain,” what would appear to be more accurate is that he was entirely indifferent to the pain that he knew black women felt. He just didn’t care.

Like I said, the real truth of Sims was even worse.

And it doesn’t get any better from there — because it’s not really the case that the “Black women don’t feel pain” quote came from a historian projecting onto Sims a belief known to have been widely held. Rather, what a little forensic digging reveals is that it was not Sims who was being quoted, but his biographer, Seale Harris.

Now, it’s worth backing off here for a moment, to make a larger point. Because when we talk about the Sims legacy, it has to be understood that we’re not just talking about Sims. We’re talking about him, of course, and he deserves every bit of scrutiny we can bring to bear on his many false claims. But it’s more than that. It’s also the majority of the male medical establishment of the time, and for the next fifty years or so. They were all responsible for erecting a façade to a man who was, at best, devious and diabolical.

And those apologists and hagiographers — the loudest champion of all — was Seale Harris.

This is Seale Harris. Harris was the son of one of Sims’s disciples, and was a Sims champion for much of his life. He played a role in the erection of the two remaining Sims monuments in the United States, and tried to have one of them installed at the U.S. Capitol.

In 1950, at age 80, Harris published Woman’s Surgeon, Sims’s only full-length biography. The book was hailed at the time of its publication.

In fact, shortly after the book’s publication, the radio show The Cavalcade of America did a radio adaptation of the book with Academy Award-winner Ray Milland in the role of Sims. You can find the recording online — it’s predictably ridiculous.

In any event, it was Harris’s book that spoke of the “grim stoicism” of the women upon whom Sims experimented. According to Harris, this was part of their “genetic endowment,” or it had been “bred into them” by generations of slavery.

And here’s the crux, here’s another reason the real truth behind “Black women don’t feel pain” is even worse…Harris said this not in Sims’s time, in 1850. Rather, he said it a full century closer to our own time, in 1950.

It was men like Harris, celebrating Sims, who ensured that the heinous belief that black women don’t feel pain survived into the twentieth century, and manages to linger still, deep in the twenty-first century.