Talk:J. Marion Sims

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I seriously doubt that he practiced his techniques on white women. Black slave women, against their consent, were used as a "mule" for Sims to perform his treacherous and painful trial and error procedures! What ashame! Although, undoubtedly, he has improved our gynecological technology, we should still bring light to the fact that these black slaves were critically harmed and that Sims, like most white people during that time...and now,....were and are RACIST!

- Coco (NY) 4/23/07 P.S. Read the book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrom written by Joy DeGruy Leary, Ph.D.

"Sims refused to provide anesthesia..." There was no anesthesia available during this time period for Sims to use. Opium and alcohol or a quick jab to the jaw to knock someone out was about it. He couldn't very well "refuse to provide" what he did not have. Some accounts indicate he did use opium, but even it was a very poor pain killer. As for the slaves, Betsy (the first of 3 slaves Sims routinely used to develop his surgical techniques) suffered a horrible fistula after childbirth that Sims attempted to repair many times.

Fistulas are painful and disgusting. According to the Fistula Foundation:

"The tissues die and a hole forms through which urine and/or feces pass uncontrollably. Women who develop fistulas are often abandoned by their husbands, rejected by their communities, and forced to live an isolated existence."

No one likes the thought of undergoing surgery without some form of anesthesia. No one. But, in this case, Betsy was living a miserable life as an outcast who passed urine/feces uncontrollably and stunk all the time. Sims believed he could improve her life if he could only repair the fistula. Anesthesia had not been invented yet and Sims used what he could to help her with the pain.

Because of Betsy (and the other 2 women), surgical instruments and sutures were discovered that advanced gynecological medicine considerably. Betsy was not a victim of needless, brutal surgery. She was a courageous heroine who desperately wanted her fistula repaired. Eventually, it was.

According to J. Marion Sims' own autobiograpy, he performed brutal surgery on slaves -- and white women. Death occurred with both whites and blacks under his surgical care. While his history in advancing medicine was distinctly at a much higher cost to black women -- no one I know disputes this --, this wikipedia entry on Sims is written in a highly incendiary manner and distinctly slanted.

I would think that the current version is more correct in terms of the anesthesia issue. First of all, fistulas are a dreadful condition, people with it are ostracized, so even surgery without anesthesia may eventually become an option if there are no alternatives; second, anesthesia was just entering medial use when he was doing his experimental surgery - I see no evidence that he "refused" its application; third, we all owe gratitude to his early patients. Ekem 00:13, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

I would check American Scientist- I believe there was an article in there about Marion Sims where they had documented an actual conversation that he had with an assistant, telling him that painkillers were not necessary. I think there was a painkiller, and that he refused to use it because he did not believe that enslaved people were human enough to need it. Piratescat 13:52, 5 April 2007 (UTC)