Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille for BuzzFlash: African-American Vaccine Hesitancy Has Roots in Egregious Medical Experiments
April 2, 2021
Vaccine hesitancy among many African-Americans can be directly traced to historical racism in medical treatment. (New York National Guard)
By Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille
Racial disparities in healthcare have resurfaced as the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in disproportionate illness and death among low wage front line workers and communities of color. According to an analysis of CDC data: “Overall, the vaccination rate among White people was over twice as high as the rate for Hispanic people (19% vs. 9%) and nearly twice as high as the rate for Black people (19% vs. 11%).”
Beyond structural barriers to access (transportation, on-line scheduling of appointments, etc.), doubts remain in the black community about getting the vaccine. In an early February “Politically Re-Active” podcast, the celebrated poet Nikki Giovanni told hosts W. Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu that she would not take the vaccine until rich white people did.
What is labeled as “vaccine hesitancy” makes deeper sense when it is understood in the context of centuries of medical experimentation on African Americans. By now, many Americans are familiar with the egregious history of the US Public Health Service’s 1932-1972 Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which African American men with syphilis were given no medical care so researchers could track the progression of the disease. And there is the story of Henrietta Lacks – an African American women whose stem cells were used for medical research without her consent. As Rebecca Skloot, author of the best-selling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, wrote in a August 2018 story, “There isn’t a person reading this who hasn’t benefitted from Henrietta’s cells, code named HeLa, which were taken without her knowledge in 1950.”
There is a good chance, however, that you have never heard of Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey, three enslaved female patients of Dr. J. Marion Sims, known as the “father of gynecology.” While there are statues commemorating Sims’ life, the women he experimented on have gone unnoticed through history. The artist Michelle Browder aims to change that with her forthcoming work, titled “Mothers of Gynecology.” (More on that later.)
Dr. Sims, Slaveholder and the Dubious “Father” of Modern Gynecology
Dr. James Marion Sims, a Southern-born slaveholder, became one of the most celebrated American surgeons of the 19th century. Sims “developed pioneering tools and surgical techniques related to women’s reproductive health,” Brynn Holland wrote in a history.com story in December 2018. Sims used Black enslaved women – without anesthesia -- as his medical test subjects.
Sims supporters say that he was simply a man of his time doing what seemed appropriate, while critics call his work at best ethically compromised, and at worst Mengele-like. And the enslaved Black women on whom he performed surgeries without anesthetics, or any numbing substance, are invisible.
“Sims, who practiced medicine at a time when treating women was considered distasteful and rarely done, invented the vaginal speculum, a tool used for dilation and examination. He also pioneered a surgical technique to repair vesicovaginal fistula, a common 19th-century complication of childbirth in which a tear between the uterus and bladder caused constant pain and urine leakage,” Holland pointed out.
Sims was president of the American Medical Association, and in 1880, he became president of the American Gynecological Society, an organization he helped found. Sims has half-dozen statues around the country devoted to him.
Holland wrote that, “According to Vanessa Gamble, university professor of medical humanities at George Washington University, Sims’s practice was deeply rooted in the trade for enslaved people. Sims built an eight-person hospital in the heart of the trading district in Montgomery. While most healthcare took place on the plantations, some stubborn cases were brought to physicians like Sims, who patched up enslaved workers so they could produce—and reproduce—for their masters again. Otherwise, they were useless to their owners.”
While treating a woman who fell off a horse, Sims “realized he needed to look directly into her vagina. He positioned her on all fours, leaning forward, and then used his fingers to help him see inside,” Holland wrote. “This discovery helped him develop the precursor to the modern speculum: the bent handle of a pewter spoon.”
He saw the patient had a vesicovaginal fistula. With no known cure, Sims began experimenting by having patients’ owners give him tewmporary ownership over them. In his autobiography “The Story of My Life,” Sims wrote “There was never a time that I could not, at any day, have had a subject for operation.”
Holland wrote that Sims performed his first operation on an 18-year-old woman named Lucy, “who had given birth a few months prior and hadn’t been able to control her bladder since. During the procedure, patients were completely naked and asked to perch on their knees and bend forward onto their elbows so their heads rested on their hands. Lucy endured an hour-long surgery, screaming and crying out in pain, as nearly a dozen other doctors watched. As Sims later wrote, “Lucy’s agony was extreme.” She became extremely ill due to his controversial use of a sponge to drain the urine away from the bladder, which led her to contract blood poisoning. “I thought she was going to die… It took Lucy two or three months to recover entirely from the effects of the operation,” he wrote.
Sims’ operations were not successful at first. He performed 30 operations on a 17-year-old enslaved woman named Anarcha before he “perfected” his method. “Afterward,” Holland wrote, “he began to practice on white women, using anesthesia, which was new to the medical field at the time.”
Sims also tested surgical procedures on enslaved Black children, “in an effort to treat “trismus nascentium” (neonatal tetanus)—with little to no success. Sims also believed that African Americans were less intelligent than white people, and thought it was because their skulls grew too quickly around their brain. He would operate on African American children using a shoemaker’s tool to pry their bones apart and loosen their skulls,” Holland wrote.
Before the Civil War, Sims moved to New York, opening “the first-ever Woman’s Hospital, where he continued testing controversial medical treatments on his patients,” Holland noted. “When any of Sims’s patients died, the blame, according to him, lay squarely with ‘the sloth and ignorance of their mothers and the Black midwives who attended them.’ He did not believe anything was wrong with his methods.”
Statues to Sims were erected in, among other places, New York City's Central Park, the South Carolina statehouse and outside his old medical school, Jefferson University, in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia statue has been moved into storage and the statue in Central Park was removed on April 17, 2018.
In a 1941 paper titled “The Negro’s Contribution to Surgery,” published in the Journal of the National Medical Association, Dr. John A. Kenney of the Tuskegee Institute, considered the dean of Black dermatology, wrote, “I suggest that a monument be raised and dedicated to the nameless Negroes who have contributed so much to surgery by the ‘guinea pig’ route.”
The Sims statue in Central Park was to be replaced by a monument honoring those women. The city chose the sculptor Vinnie Bagwell to the project the following year, but nothing has materialized as of yet.
J.C. Hallman, author of a piece in the Montgomery Advertiser, headlined “J. Marion Sims statue: A questionable monument in a questionable place,” is writing a dual biography of Sims and the most important of his experimental subjects, the young enslaved woman known as Anarcha.
Working to complete her massive project with Bay Area sculptor Dana Albany, Michelle Browder’s “Mothers of Gynecology,” incorporates found objects into the work. “It’s fitting that we’re using found objects, because these women we’re honoring were discarded,” Browder recently told the San Francisco Chronicle. “They were dismissed and treated as junk, so I thought it would be perfect to bring into this piece the beauty of the broken.”
The massive sculpture is scheduled to debut in Montgomery, Alabama on Mother’s Day, nearby the National Museum for Peace and Justice.
Bill Berkowitz is an Oakland, California-based freelance writer covering right-wing movements. His work has appeared in BuzzFlash, The Nation, Huffington Post, The Progressive, AlterNet, Street Sheet, In These Times, and many other print and online publications, as well as being cited in several books.
Gale Bataille is a long time activist, social worker and mental health director for Solano and San Mateo counties. She currently consults to improve health access, equity and the integration of care in the public sector.
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