Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy

Summary

Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy were three enslaved women in central Alabama on whom the surgeon J. Marion Sims operated repeatedly between 1845 and 1849, without anesthesia, as he developed the surgical technique for repairing vesicovaginal fistulae. They were the first three patients in what Sims later called the first women’s hospital in the United States, a small slave farm in Mount Meigs, Alabama. Anarcha endured roughly thirty surgeries before Sims finally closed her fistula with silver sutures. Betsy and Lucy were leased to Sims from their owners under similar circumstances. They also served as Sims’s surgical nurses, learning the technique they were being subjected to, and continued to perform domestic and agricultural labor. Cooper Owens has argued that they should be regarded as the “mothers” of American gynecology rather than be reduced to anonymous experimental subjects.

What Is Known of Each

The three women are the most well-documented members of a group of about a dozen enslaved women and girls who lived and worked together on Sims’s slave farm in Mount Meigs, a lumber town roughly fifteen miles from the slave-trading center of Montgomery, between 1844 and 1849.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) About nine other women in the group remain unidentified.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)

Anarcha was Sims’s first enslaved gynecological patient, a seventeen-year-old whom Sims had first attended during her two-day labor. The fistula that became the focus of his subsequent surgical work had developed during that protracted birth under his own care.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Over the next four years she was the primary subject of Sims’s experimental fistula surgeries. After his thirtieth surgery on Anarcha, Sims successfully closed her fistula with silver sutures, an improvement on John Peter Mettauer’s lead sutures.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) The technique was then applied to Sims’s other patients.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)

Betsy and Lucy had visited Sims earlier because of protracted labor and the resulting fistulae, and Sims sent for them and leased them from their owners after Anarcha’s case was identified.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Sims himself wrote of Lucy postoperatively: he claimed she “bore the operation with great heroism and bravery,” but in his own autobiography he also recorded that her bladder became inflamed after the operation and that her “agony was extreme.”(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) The contradiction between the public framing and the autobiographical record is one of the principal pieces of evidence Cooper Owens uses to read Sims’s narrative against itself.

A fourth strand of the historical record concerns an unnamed enslaved woman in the same group. An 1850 census recorded a one-year-old “mulatto” girl on Sims’s slave farm, born to one of his enslaved gynecological patients, with a Black mother and a white father.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Cooper Owens describes the discovery as confirming her own historical hypothesis: she had suspected that, given the conditions of long-term experimental confinement and the cultural assumptions that surrounded enslaved women’s bodies, at least one birth would have occurred on Sims’s farm during the experimental years.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)

Their roles were not limited to that of patients. The three women, along with the others on the farm, also served as Sims’s surgical nurses. They learned the fundamentals of gynecological surgery from arguably the most successful gynecologist of the nineteenth century while continuing to perform domestic slave labor; Cooper Owens argues that during the five years they lived on Sims’s farm, they knew more about the repair of obstetrical fistulae than most American doctors of the period.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) They took on this surgical-nursing role specifically after Sims’s white medical apprentices quit because his surgeries had failed for two years; he then trained the enslaved patients themselves to assist him.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)

The Surgical Context

The three women’s experimental ordeal took place in the absence of anesthesia. Although ether was demonstrated as a surgical anesthetic in 1846, Sims continued to operate on Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy without it through the late 1840s; only after he moved to New York and began operating on white middle-class patients did anesthesia become routine in his practice. Sims’s progression from Mettauer’s lead sutures to silver wire was the technical breakthrough that defined the surgical specialty,(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) and it was developed entirely on these patients’ bodies.

The mobility and labor expected of the three women complicate any simple distinction between “patients” and “nurses.” Fett’s broader study of enslaved women’s healing labor on antebellum plantations describes how midwifery in particular afforded enslaved women unusual mobility across plantation boundaries, enabling travel between Black and white households and the maintenance of kin networks.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Sims’s slave farm was a different setting, since the women lived on the farm rather than traveling to it, but the larger pattern of enslaved women carrying obstetric and surgical knowledge through plantation networks is the context in which their later role as surgical nurses should be read.

The same evidence supplies the documentary basis for the Anarcha-Betsy-Lucy story and the principal interpretive caution. With the exception of a few WPA-era recollections at the outer edge of the case, the only surviving voice describing what happened to the three women is Sims’s own. Many of the most direct claims about their pain and recovery are accordingly classified as provenance: primary_via_secondary in the underlying evidence cards: Sims’s autobiography quoted by Cooper Owens. Cooper Owens specifically argues against an entirely “lost voices” framing of these patients and works to recover what can be recovered from the cracks in Sims’s own narrative, including the moments where his clinical descriptions of physical restraint contradict his published claims that Black women were impervious to pain.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)

The encounter between Sims and his three patients also became a stable rhetorical device used by other doctors. At Sims’s 1883 funeral, the obstetrician William Waring Johnston eulogized Sims’s enslaved patients as “humble negro servitors” who had brought “their willing sufferings and patient endurance” to his research, casting them as voluntary participants when they had no capacity to consent. As Cooper Owens notes, informed consent did not exist for slave patients; the women were experimented on because their masters permitted them to be.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) In an 1862 illustration of Sims operating on a fistula patient, the published image depicts a fully-clothed white patient with a white nurse handling the speculum, erasing the naked, restrained enslaved women on whom the original procedures had been performed.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)

Contemporary Recognition

The recovery of Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy as historical agents rather than as anonymous experimental material is a relatively recent development. Cooper Owens’s 2017 Medical Bondage is one of the principal scholarly contributions to that recovery; she explicitly proposes that the three women, along with the others on Sims’s farm, be regarded as the rightful “mothers” of American gynecology, a designation set against Sims’s traditional title as “father.”(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)

Two public-history projects have made the names visible outside the academy. The Mothers of Gynecology Monument, dedicated in Montgomery, Alabama, in 2021, depicts Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy as fifteen-foot metal figures by the artist Michelle Browder; the location is roughly fifteen miles from the Mount Meigs slave farm where the surgeries took place. The Anarcha Project, an interdisciplinary scholarly and artistic effort begun in the early 2000s, has worked to recover what can be recovered of Anarcha’s specific biography from estate records, plantation records, and burial registers; that project has more recently identified candidate identifications for “Anarcha Westcott” in the surrounding county records, although the documentary record remains thin. [TODO: cite Anarcha Project once a Library source is filed]

In April 2018, the bronze statue of J. Marion Sims that had stood in Central Park since 1934 was removed by order of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Public Design Commission and relocated to Sims’s grave in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. The removal followed sustained public protest and a year of formal review, and it explicitly cited the three women’s experimental ordeal as the reason for the relocation. [TODO: cite a NYC Public Design Commission or AP source for the 2018 removal once a Library source is filed]

Other Forms of Resistance in the Same Archive

The names of Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy stand in for a wider pattern of enslaved women’s responses to white sexual and surgical authority that surfaces only intermittently in the surviving record. Cooper Owens recovers some of those moments to set against the silence of the Mount Meigs hospital. Bondwoman Martha Bradley, working in the field on the Lucas plantation, struck the overseer with her hoe after he made a sexual advance and reported the incident to her master. The response was unusual on both sides: Bradley spoke openly about an event that most enslaved women had no safe channel to report, and her master Lucas, after she described what the overseer had said, stopped whipping her. The incident is rare in the archive less because it was rare in life than because it was rarely written down.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)

The narrative of Mrs. John Little, a Canadian refugee whose interview Cooper Owens reads alongside the Sims case, illustrates the more typical mode of resistance, which was silence. Mrs. Little had assisted another enslaved woman in obtaining an abortion before the two planned an escape; the abortion had been performed by a third enslaved woman who had been told of the escape plan. When her master and overseer interrogated her about the disappearance of the woman’s pregnancy, Mrs. Little refused to admit what she knew. She described the interrogation in physical terms — the master’s remarks about her shape, the threat of the strike — but stayed silent about the abortion to protect both the woman and the abortionist.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) The Mount Meigs evidence has nothing comparable in the first person; what survives is filtered entirely through Sims’s pen. Cooper Owens reads cases like Bradley’s and Little’s against that absence to show the kinds of agency that the Sims archive is structurally unable to record.

Notes on the Archive

Almost everything that can be said about these three women’s interior lives is reconstructed from the writings of the man who operated on them. Cooper Owens’s interpretive principle is that this asymmetry should be acknowledged rather than smoothed over: “patients do not leave archives; doctors do.”(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) The page above honors that principle by marking specifically where the only surviving voice is Sims’s, and by reading his clinical record for the cracks where his own description of restraint and “extreme agony” contradicts the eulogistic frame his colleagues later imposed.

Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy

Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy

Summary

What Is Known of Each

The Surgical Context

Contemporary Recognition

Other Forms of Resistance in the Same Archive

Notes on the Archive

See Also

Sources