A Statue Women Should Be Invested

Ojanuga further states that: “Many white women came to Sims for treatment of vesicovaginal fistula after the successful operation on Anarcha. However, none of them, due to the pain, were able to endure a single operation.” This allegation, often repeated, is also false. For example, Sims published a detailed case study of a white woman who came to him with a fistula in 1849, which he was eventually able to repair after three operations, none of which involved the use of anaesthesia.27 Terri Kapsalis, writing with reference to Sims's later career in New York, declares that “the widespread use of anesthetics finally allowed Sims to bring his surgeries to white women and allowed for the establishment of places such as the Woman's Hospital”.8 Sims himself, however, in a public lecture to the New York Academy of Medicine given on November 18, 1857, at a time when he was actively engaged in the practice of surgery at the Woman's Hospital in New York (whose clientele were almost exclusively white and many of whom were of middle or upper middle class origin), noted that he never resorted to the use of anaesthetics in fistula operations “because they are not painful enough to justify the trouble, and risk attending their administration”.22 In retrospect this was certainly an unfortunate error in clinical judgment—a mistaken “calculus of suffering”—but it was not anaesthetic racism. It is also worth pointing out that if Sims had used anaesthesia in operating on his first fistula patients before the safety and efficacy of ether and chloroform had been sufficiently established for routine clinical use, this, too, would have constituted another therapeutic experiment on slaves.