Some of the most important early advances in women's health came at the expense of young women who were used in experimental surgical procedures. In "Say Anarcha", J.C. Hallman unearths the story of a heroic black woman at the center of advances in modern women's healthcare. Join us in an intriguing discussion with author J.C. Hallman, his research and what he learned about Anarcha and other enslaved women forced to undergo experimental gynecological surgeries in 19th century Alabama.
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Episode Transcript
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SPEAKER_02 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Glenda.
And I'm Lisa.
And we are Two Black Moms and aMic.
Between us, we have six kids,four boys and two girls.
SPEAKER_03 (00:12):
And we're here to talk to you about everything
from diapers to degrees.
Welcome to our podcast.
Welcome to our podcast.
Today, we're so delighted tohave J.C.
Hallman.
J.C.
is a highly respected author whohas numerous published books.
In addition, J.C.
has published a book of shortstories and edited two
(00:33):
anthologies of creativecriticism.
And he's the recipient of a 2010McKnight Artist Fellowship in
Fiction and a 2013 fellowshipfrom the John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation in the generalnonfiction category.
But today we want to talk to himabout his current book, Say
(00:53):
Anarka, which just came out thissummer.
And this book has gotten a lotof exceptional reviews by many
outlets, including the New YorkTimes.
And he was recently interviewedabout his book on National
Public Radio.
Welcome, J.C., Hey there.
Thank you so much for having me.
Great.
We're really excited that you'rehere today.
And I read through your book.
(01:15):
Your research and your book aretruly, truly fascinating, but
also very disturbing andtraumatizing to read about
Anarcha.
And for our audience, I justwant to summarize that your book
documents the use of enslavedwomen who were forced to undergo
experimental gynecologicalsurgeries in 19th century
Alabama.
(01:36):
And these surgeries wereperformed by a male surgeon who
achieved great acclaim, but atthe expense of so many
African-American women who weresubjected to incredible painful
experiences.
So this book really exposes alot about this highly acclaimed
surgeon.
surgeon.
Can you tell us more about yourbook and about the premise?
(01:57):
Sure.
I mean, I think
SPEAKER_00 (01:58):
just to address kind of the difficulty of the book,
this is definitely not a cozyread, right?
Right.
And the way I thought of thatwas that I just kept coming back
to this line in my head thatreading is a form of bearing
witness.
And here was this really, reallyimportant and often overlooked
moment in the history ofmedicine, which informs the
world that we live in, in a lotof different ways.
(02:21):
And so I approached the book ina very unflinching way, knowing
that it was going to be a veryheavy and even difficult read,
but a necessary one tounderstand the world we live in,
both in terms of the ongoingwhite supremacist mindset that
continues to infect the countryand in terms of coming to a
(02:41):
deeper understanding about thehealth inequities that afflict
the modern medical world.
SPEAKER_03 (02:46):
Yeah, it really touches a lot of emotional
points, at least for me when Iwas reading it.
Can you tell us something alittle bit more about Anarka
herself and how you came to findout about her and what intrigued
you about her story?
SPEAKER_00 (03:02):
Sure.
So the origin story for me andmy journey with the book is not
very interesting.
I just stumbled across the termvesicovaginal fistula, which is
a term for the condition thatAnarka and a number of other
women suffered from in the 1840sthat were the center of the
story, the birth story of modernwomen's health.
(03:22):
Let's
SPEAKER_03 (03:23):
just to clarify, because I had to look
SPEAKER_00 (03:49):
that up.
And that hole can be between thevagina and the rectum.
It can be with the bladder.
It can be with the urethra.
And so vesicovaginal fistula,the term that usually gets used
for this, is an abnormal openingbetween the bladder and the
vagina.
It is a horrific condition.
(04:09):
And it is a condition thatcontinues to affect the
developing world and Africatoday.
And so...
It caught my attention because Isaw that this story, the ongoing
health crisis in Africa, wasconnected to the story of the
birth of modern women's health.
That what looked like twostories, because people were
(04:31):
already talking about this.
They knew about Anarka.
They knew about this doctor whohad performed a series of
experiments on Anarka andapproximately 10 other women in
downtown Montgomery, Alabama.
But this line of connection fromthat story, this group of
enslaved teenagers in Alabama towhat's happening in Africa today
and to the connections toeverything we're talking about
(04:53):
today in terms of healthinequities in the United States
and in the developed world.
It was all one story.
Yeah.
So finding a way to tell thestory from the past in a way
that connected to the modernmoment was essential for me.
SPEAKER_03 (05:07):
So how did you find that out, though, about
Anarchist's story specifically?
I mean, it's an incredible readbecause on the one hand, I feel
like I'm reading fiction becauseit's so detailed.
The Day to Day of the YoungWomen, Dr.
Sims.
It's almost like I'm readingfiction, but I'm not because I
know that it's like a realstory.
Yeah.
So how did you do your research?
(05:28):
So there's a lot of questions inthere already.
SPEAKER_00 (05:30):
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the book reads like anovel, but it's not.
It's narrative.
It's a narrative nonfiction.
And, you know, there was so muchabout the story that there were
so many complexities to thestory that I thought that the
way it needed to be approachedwas as a story, not as a or an
academic study.
Those works had been done.
(05:51):
Yeah, because I think that's whyit got me in.
It brought me in.
Right, right.
Because of the way that it'swritten.
Yeah, yeah.
I thought that it needed to be astory that you inhabited.
Yeah.
You felt.
You needed to feel the presenceof these people.
You needed to feel thecomplexities of the situations
at those critical moments whenparticularly controversial
things were happening.
You needed to feel it and notjust hear about it.
(06:12):
And so that's why I approachedit.
And to answer your firstquestion, you know, when I first
was trying to discover whatvesicovaginal was, your Googling
just immediately heads to thisstory.
It was, again, that connectionfrom the ongoing health crisis
in Africa to the story of J.
Marion Sims and the experimentsthat he performed.
He's considered the father ofgynecology.
(06:32):
So this was the critical moment.
And he started the first women'shospital in New York, right?
He's a founder.
That's something he gets creditfor.
But it turned out that thishospital that he started in New
York, he left Alabama in 1853and founded a new hospital in
1855.
And that's why there was astatue to him in New York City.
He sometimes gets credit forstarting this new hospital for
(06:55):
women, the first hospital forwomen in the United States and
maybe the world.
There's debates about that.
But ultimately, even thathospital in New York was just
another field of experimentationfor him.
He traded experimenting onenslaved women in Alabama for
experimenting on Irishimmigrants.
SPEAKER_03 (07:13):
Wow.
In New York City.
He went from African-Americanwomen to Irish immigrants.
SPEAKER_00 (07:18):
Right.
Which is not a parallel.
There is no way in which Irishwomen, Irish immigrants are
enslaved.
They are free people.
Yeah.
But this was also a very, veryvulnerable population.
These were women who had escapedthe potato famine on board what
were called coffin ships.
And so they come to the UnitedStates.
They land in New York.
They're poor.
And there was definitelyclassism against the Irish in
(07:40):
New York City at this time.
It was trading one vulnerablepopulation for another.
But it's important to make thatdistinction and not pretend like
Irish immigrants were theequivalent of the enslaved
population in the United States.
That's just not the case.
SPEAKER_03 (07:53):
So I mentioned earlier that the first of your
stories about anarcha werepublished in Harper magazine.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it was caught by, I guess,Mayor de Blasio's people.
So what happened back in 2017 isbefore the book was published.
It's a little more complicated
SPEAKER_00 (08:10):
than that because there were these groups of
women's groups andAfrican-American groups that
have been protesting thismonument in New York for the
better part of a decade.
And I came along much later andI was more or less covering what
these groups were doing by wayof protesting that monument in
New York City.
It was all happening kind ofbefore the monument debate
started to happen and pitchedHarper's, I'm going to write a
(08:32):
biography of this monument.
And of course, it talked aboutAnarcha and Sims.
But it was finished, you know,in early 2017.
And that's more or less rightwhen Confederate monuments
started to come down all acrossthe country.
And Harper's was just holding onto the article.
And then the real thing thathappened is the white
nationalist march inCharlottesville over monuments.
(08:54):
And there was a death and thatbecame hugely controversial.
And then those groups in NewYork, they staged another
protest at the site of the Simsmonument a week later.
And this time the Sims storywent absolutely viral.
And that gave Harper's justenough time to take my already
completed article and put it onthe cover of the magazine.
So when that debate in New Yorkboiled over and de Blasio
(09:15):
announced this 90-day commissionto reconsider New York's policy
on monuments, the magazine hadjust enough time to put it out
so that we could get it to themembers of the commission that
were considering this question.
But it's most accurate to saythat that article played a
backup role to the women andblack youth groups in particular
that had been protesting thatstatue for a decade and had been
(09:38):
getting totally stonewalled by anumber of institutions in New
York City.
SPEAKER_03 (09:42):
Yeah, because I didn't know until, you know, I
kind of got up to speed aboutAnarka's story.
So that's pretty incredible.
So I wanted to turn ourattention.
We've talked some about Anarka,but what about her story,
though?
I mean, because she wasexperimented on as a young woman
and there were a number of otherwomen experimented on.
What were those women supposedto do otherwise if they suffered
(10:06):
from this
SPEAKER_00 (10:06):
fistula?
The first thing I'll say is thatAnarka has always been a kind of
a ghostly figure in historybecause for many years, for
decades, the only source thatwas known about her, that told
us anything at all about her,was Sims himself.
He was not a reliable source.
Everybody understood that he wasa self-promoter and a
self-aggrandizer, and he was theonly source.
(10:28):
So even though people had beenthinking and writing about her
for some time, likening her caseto Henrietta Lacks, for example,
Yeah.
(11:05):
And so my book is based ondozens, hundreds of sources
about Anarka's life that are notfound in any other source.
And to come back around to thelatter part of your question,
Sims gets credit for being thefirst doctor to cure obstetric
fistula.
That's the narrative you'll seeif you go looking for this.
That's what I found when I firstGoogled it, though it stunk for
(11:28):
me right from the beginning.
And what I found is that it'sjust not true.
You know, he wasn't the first tocure this condition.
And even the cure that heclaimed on Anarka was for a
device that was abandoned just afew years after he published it.
So there was a lot of falsehoodsabout this narrative that were
just embedded in the history.
But the truth at the time isthat This was a very horrific
(11:50):
condition.
It's one of the worst thingsthat can happen to a woman's
body.
And there wasn't many options,just as there's not many options
for women today in Africa whowind up with this condition in
very remote areas or who arerequired by policies of wife
seclusion to stay on the familyhomestead and never leave.
What this means, though, forAnarka and the others is beyond
(12:13):
being enslaved persons who couldnot provide informed consent for
medical experimentation.
it meant that they were also anincredibly vulnerable
population, vulnerable tocoercion.
Because women who have thiscondition would want to be
cured, but that means they wouldbe vulnerable to the false or
exaggerated promises of someonewho comes along and says, well,
(12:33):
I can cure you.
A terribly horrific condition.
And at the time, there would nothave been many options.
And women who have thiscondition often wind up being
ostracized by their families andtheir communities.
Husbands leave them.
They lose everything.
It's a truly brutal conditionand there would not have been
many options at the time.
SPEAKER_03 (12:50):
Does Anarka have descendants that you're aware
of?
And if so, did you communicatewith them at all or the
descendants of any of the otherwomen that were operated on by
Dr.
Sims?
In the beginning of your book,you outline, and it's a lot of
people who contributed to thebook and to the compilation of
(13:10):
information who have sincepassed away, right?
The long list of names.
Were you ever able to reach anyof the descendants of Anarka or
of those women who weresubjected to Dr.
Simms?
SPEAKER_00 (13:22):
The first part is that the way I told Anarka's
story was by combining thisprimary source scaffold of her
life, all these dozens ofsources.
But that was more like askeleton.
And so to give her life a senseof passion and presence and
atmosphere, I called on the WPAslave narratives, the interviews
with thousands of formerlyenslaved persons, to call on the
(13:46):
details of people who wereAnarka's contemporaries,
recollecting many years laterwhat their lives as enslaved
persons were like.
And so, yeah, I credit all ofthe individuals whose narratives
I called on to contribute to thetelling of Anarka's story in
that way at the front of thebook.
Just to
SPEAKER_03 (14:02):
read those pages right up front, center, to me
was just really chilling.
Yeah,
SPEAKER_00 (14:07):
it was really important to us.
My name's not on the front ofthe book.
There's no dedication.
There's no acknowledgement page.
We really wanted to pull all theattention to those names and, of
course, to Anarka's name on thecover.
SPEAKER_03 (14:17):
Yeah.
And how long did it take you topull all of this information and
write your book?
It
SPEAKER_00 (14:23):
was about eight, nine years.
Man, wow.
It was a long time.
It was a long haul.
But I want to go back to yourquestion about descendants
because that is reallyfascinating.
I was able to calculate thatAnarka had a total of 10
pregnancies that came to termover her lifetime.
And she died quite young,probably at around 45, 47.
(14:45):
It's not 100% clear exactly whenshe was born, so guesses about
her age are just that.
They're estimations.
So she had four children livingwith her when she died.
It appears that those childrendid not go on to leave children
behind of their own.
But she's buried alongside theman who was her husband at the
end, a man named LorenzoJackson.
You know, as I said, I followedher life story.
(15:07):
We followed the story all theway to her gravesite, a marked
grave in a lonely forest inVirginia.
And so her husband had adaughter by a previous partner.
Anarka had a daughter.
And these two daughters becamevery close.
They moved to Washington, D.C.
They lived together here fortheir entire lives and were
very, very close.
Were family in every way butblood.
(15:29):
That daughter of Lorenzo, Luisa,she left behind children.
we have located descendants ofthat part of the family.
Wow, that's amazing.
And so we're now making aneffort to make sure that her
grave site is protected and thatthose descendants have access to
it.
When I contacted them, they knewthat this had existed and they
(15:50):
knew there were rumors thatthere was a significant person.
So they had rumors of her story.
Yeah, but they didn't know much.
But the location of this gravehad been lost completely.
Some time ago, I escorted one ofthose descendants out to the
gravesite.
I'm going to be doing so againvery soon.
Oh, that's wonderful.
That's really inspiring.
SPEAKER_03 (16:09):
And I want to talk a little bit, too, about Dr.
Sims and his colleagues.
They had to know that he wassketchy.
Did you get a sense of thereaction of his colleagues to
him?
SPEAKER_00 (16:20):
Yeah.
As I said, you know, in 2017,the Sims story went viral as a
result of that protest.
And there has been concern sincethen, as the story has become
more controversial, that Simsalways had his champions and his
apologists.
That's true even today.
And those folks have tended tolook at what's happening now,
and they worry that we'reprojecting modern values into
(16:43):
the past, which is like ahistorical no-no.
You're not supposed to do that.
When I'm critical of Sims, whatI'm doing is I'm relying on his
contemporary critics, that therewere a number of doctors, many
doctors, who were very concernedabout Sims' methods and his
ethics and his efforts to makehimself wealthy and famous.
And the amazing thing is thathis greatest critics, the people
(17:06):
who were most critical of him,were the ones who knew him best,
his assistants.
He had an assistant in Alabamanamed Nathan Bozeman, and he had
an assistant in New York Citynamed Thomas Addis Emmett.
So his greatest critics were thedoctors who were sitting right
beside him as he worked.
And it is those voices that I'mcalling on to recreate the story
(17:29):
of his rise to fame and thecontroversies that he triggered
even in his own lifetime.
Once again, it is not usprojecting modern values into
the past.
It's us listening to the voicesof the past, warning us about
the future that this guy wasbringing in.
SPEAKER_03 (17:44):
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's so insightful.
Tell us, why should we read thisbook?
SPEAKER_00 (17:50):
Again, I think it goes back to that question of
recognizing that it's not justthis moment from the past.
It's not just a quirky part ofhistory.
We are living with the effectsof this particular past.
And I think, like right now, forexample, we're living under a
time when women's bodilyautonomy is under as great a
threat And if we truly want toundermine that, then the thing
(18:14):
we should do is go back andundermine the legacies of the
first people who tried to takeaway that autonomy.
Yes.
And if you want to truly changethe trajectory of where we are
now and where we're going, thenyou have to go all the way back
to the beginning and affect thattrajectory from where it truly
began.
And J.
Marion Sims really doesrepresent this crux moment of a
(18:38):
sort of fulcrum moment in thehistory of medicine.
And so I think that, again,going back to that idea of
reading being a form of bearingwitness.
that this is the thing that canultimately help us chart a
better future.
The way to chart a better futurebegins in the past.
SPEAKER_03 (18:53):
Yeah, it's interesting that you make that
connection because, I mean,there's so many incidences in
history where humans are usedfor quote unquote medical
purposes, but just kind ofbutchered up.
I mean, we know about the use ofpeople in Tuskegee and for
syphilis experimentation.
And recently, HarvardUniversity, I was reading,
(19:14):
admitted to having humans ofNative Americans for human
experimentation from many, manyyears ago, but that they still
have human remains in theirlaboratories and now are
beginning to reach out tofamilies, maybe in the last few
years, reaching out to familiesto return the human remains to
the families.
(19:35):
So this is an issue that isclearly an historical issue, but
still has present implicationsin the many ways that you've
discussed and this story aboutHarvard returning human remains
is very unsettling, I wouldthink, for most people.
And these were Native Americanhuman remains, principally.
SPEAKER_00 (19:54):
Can I respond?
I think there's a lot to saythere about Sim's role in that.
I think that simultaneously, asa guy who was seeking the status
of being a surgical pioneer byperforming experiments on human
beings, he was paving the wayfor a lot of even worse
atrocities that came along afterhim.
As I said, there were plenty ofpeople who were calling for
(20:16):
medical ethics at the time andwho were expressing concern
about consent andexperimentation in the 1850s.
But there was this other cadrethat just really felt like the
ends justified the means.
And you see that, the fame thatSims accrued and the way that
his legacy was solidified into arhetorical facade, literally the
(20:37):
father of gynecology, but thenalso literal facades in terms of
the monuments that were createdto him, that this, in And that
inspired many others to followin those footsteps.
And that was a very whitesupremacist informed agenda that
gave people a kind of quasilogical and sort of emboldened
(20:58):
them
SPEAKER_03 (20:59):
to
SPEAKER_00 (20:59):
prey on vulnerable people.
Right.
It really feeds directly intothe history of scientific racism
and it feeds later into themovement of early 20th century
eugenics.
There are many, many ways inwhich people were following
these particular footsteps.
And what's important toremember, though, is that is
that it isn't just Sims.
I argue in the introduction ofthe book that Anarka is a
symbol.
I'm presenting her as a symboliccharacter symbol.
(21:21):
She's a kind of composite figurewho is symbolic of a lot of
other women who sufferedalongside her and who suffered
at the hands of other doctors.
But Sims too is a kind of symbolbecause it's not just him.
It was the entire male medicalestablishment that was a lot of
them wanting to follow exactlyin his footsteps.
Though again, it was otherdoctors who were raising
(21:43):
concerns about This has
SPEAKER_03 (21:51):
been a great conversation.
And now we've got a specialguest.
So we have Amy Hallman, and thisis JC's sister, who is also a
law school classmate of mine atUVA.
Amy is an attorney in San Diego.
We have her as our guest todayto kind of fill out even more
these issues of JC's disclosuresfrom the book and issues of
(22:16):
health inequity.
So Amy, thank you for being withus today.
SPEAKER_01 (22:20):
Thanks for having me.
Good to see
SPEAKER_03 (22:22):
you.
I know, good to see you too.
So Tell me, as the sister ofJ.C., what were your
observations when he was doinghis research for this incredible
book?
SPEAKER_01 (22:35):
Well, I've watched his career for 20 years now, and
I think this book in particularhas been such a passion project
for him.
And about three years ago duringthe pandemic, he was towards the
end of writing the book and hecame out to visit me and was
staying with me.
And I just, you know, waswatching him writing the end of
(22:55):
the book and just kind ofbearing witness to that was
really special for me.
And it was kind of the firsttime I got as invested in one of
his books as I have.
And now I'm really like helpingto market it and it's become a
passion project of my own.
SPEAKER_03 (23:12):
That's great.
And to me, you know, gynecologyIt's just so personal for women
and kind of treacherous thingsthat like Anarka and the other
women were subjected to werejust so personal and just so
enraging.
What is your takeaways wherethat's concerned?
I mean, it is on many levelsjust sort of such a personal
(23:34):
topic.
SPEAKER_01 (23:35):
Yeah, it's hard to read the book and not just cry.
Some of my friends who have readit have said, I'm listening to
the audible.
I have to stop.
I have to take a break.
What she's gone through.
It's just so I can't evenimagine.
It's so heart wrenching.
SPEAKER_03 (23:51):
And the thing is, like, because I know some people
don't like to read difficultbooks or watch difficult movies,
but I think we have anobligation.
SPEAKER_01 (23:58):
Yes.
SPEAKER_03 (23:58):
Yes.
You know, we have to educateourselves.
We have to know who the playerswere.
Yeah.
We have to know how the victimssuffered.
Right.
So that we can guard against ithappening, you know, again.
And I think.
I think J.C.
raised the issue of the wholeabortion
SPEAKER_01 (24:37):
debate.
Yeah.
And help us recognize that, youknow, she really and the others,
too, but she was experimentedon, you know, more than 30
times.
Yeah.
She was the most consequentialof them.
And to have gone through that.
I mean, it's amazing she
SPEAKER_03 (24:54):
survived it, quite honestly.
SPEAKER_01 (24:56):
Yes.
Yes.
And to give her rightful placeand to recognize that, you know,
we really all have a debt toher.
That's
SPEAKER_03 (25:04):
so
SPEAKER_01 (25:04):
true.
Because, you know, in thiscountry, the conditions
eradicated.
That's not the case.
In Africa.
No, it's not.
Right.
SPEAKER_00 (25:12):
Can I pop in there?
Thank you to my sister forspeaking so movingly.
Thank you.
It means a great deal to me thatthe book has come to mean so
much to her.
Thank you so much.
(25:51):
is affecting lives in good waystoday, though it has to be
acknowledged that came at theprice of snatching away a field
of medicine that hadtraditionally been for women,
midwifery.
But it's also accurate to saythere was one clinical advance
that came out of the Alabamafistula experiments.
Anarka and Lucy and Betsy andthe seven others who formed the
(26:13):
initial core of experimentalsubjects, they were gathered
together.
They lived together.
They cared for one anotherduring the extended aftercare
period that was required forthis condition.
They went on to become nursesand assistants when Sims'
medical students and hiscolleagues abandoned him in
Alabama.
Anarka had been a nurse before,during, and after the fistula
experiments.
which is another sort of newrevelation from the book.
(26:36):
But this was the thing thattraveled.
These young women pioneering apatient-centered model of care
where women live together, carefor one another, and eventually
become complicit in their owncures.
That's the thing that moved toNew York City and then inspired
a very famous fistula hospitalin Ethiopia, the Addis Ababa
Fistula Hospital.
And there's a plaque on the wallsaying, oh, this hospital was
(26:57):
inspired by J.
Marion Sims.
And then that hospital inspiredclinics all over the The truth
here is not that Sims inspiredit, because what they did in
Ethiopia is they did the samething Sims did.
They took the women who werefistula survivors and they
turned them into nurses andassistants and caregivers.
And in 2018, afterward for thebook about all of this, I went
(27:19):
to Ethiopia and Nigeria andUganda to see these women who
were like hundreds of anarchistsliving today, doing just what
these young women in Alabama haddone.
That's the thing that istransforming lives today.
There are millions and millionsof women who suffer from this
condition and have terrible lifeconditions, but some of them are
(27:40):
being cured.
And the thing to recognize, thething that I wanted my book to
nail down completely was thatthat advance that came out of
the Alabama fistula experimentsthat owes nothing to J.
Marion Sims and it oweseverything to this small group
of enslaved teenagers fromAlabama.
Wow, that's amazing.
SPEAKER_03 (27:57):
And I just to kind of take that idea and then fast
forward a bit to where we aretoday with health inequities.
I mean, you know, you readabout, you know, women of means
who are not given full access tohealth care, not listened to
when they're in healthfacilities.
And then you read about, youknow, clinical trials that may,
you know, not include women or,you know, minority women in
(28:20):
particular when trying to findadvances in medicine to cure,
say, the heart ailments or otherinternal organ ailments.
So I think that the story ofAnarka that you've made
available now to the world kindof feeds into the fact that all
of these issues are importantfor the whole country, for
everyone, for women and for men,regardless of your age and your
(28:41):
race, your national origins, sothat we have a healthcare system
that, you know, is accountableto all of us.
And so I think it seems like tome, the story of Anarka kind of
helps us get closer to that kindof ideal.
How do you feel about that, Amy?
SPEAKER_01 (28:56):
Yeah, I think that's definitely the case.
SPEAKER_00 (28:58):
I think there are a number of great examples of
prominent African-American womenwho find that they don't get the
same kind of health care asMarina Williams.
And in less famous cases, Dr.
Susan Moore in Ohio, who wasdenied pain medication while she
was dying of COVID.
She was a physician.
Oh my God.
And she is in the hospital.
She's a medical doctor and she'sdenied pain medication.
(29:21):
She doesn't die from not beinggiven pain medication, but on a
kind of palliative level, shewasn't believed.
And she said very bluntly thatthey treated her like she was a
drug addict.
You know, then there was just arecent story about involuntary
hysterectomies happening.
I think it was in SouthCarolina.
It was just a few years ago.
Yeah.
Right.
(30:07):
And he very likely believedthat.
But to say that, where does thatcome from in his history?
It actually doesn't come fromhim.
It comes from his biographer.
(30:28):
a guy who wrote the onlyfull-length biography of J.
Marion Sims.
And this guy said it verybluntly, said that black women
have a resistance to pain bredinto them by generations of
servitude on and on and on.
And he said that not in 1850.
He said that in 1950.
Oh, my gosh.
So just recognizing, again, thatit's not just Sims.
It is that mindset that createdand sustained his facade.
(30:51):
And that is the thing that istrickling down to the modern
moment.
SPEAKER_03 (30:54):
All I can say is, you know, you can't change minds
overnight, but we can educate.
And oh, and one last thing I dohave to ask you.
Why do you call it Say
SPEAKER_00 (31:02):
Anarka?
I'm thinking of the Say Her Namemovement, right?
You know, I think that the ideathat all anybody knew was her
name for a long time.
There was a moment in one of theprotests at the site of the Sims
Monument where those protesterswere walking up Fifth Avenue,
blocking traffic, chanting, SayHer Name, Anarka, Say Her Name.
Oh, wow.
(31:22):
Say Her Name, Betsy.
So they said, Say Her Name, SayAnarka.
Oh, yeah.
And so I wanted to cite that.
And then as well, you know, Ithink in that block of names
we're talking about at thebeginning, right?
That to talk about theimportance of names.
And then I would say evenduring, throughout the book,
there are times when I'm talkingabout groups of enslaved people
and sometimes it just becomes alist of names.
(31:45):
And I think that symbolicallythat anthem, say her name or say
their names, say his name,George Floyd, this becomes a way
of asserting loudly that we'renot going to forget.
SPEAKER_03 (31:57):
Wow.
Well, this, it's an incrediblebook and I can't say enough
about how enlightening it is.
You learn so much about ourhistory and it's easy to read,
to be honest with you.
I mean, it's a very easy way tolearn more about our history and
to learn about the sacrifices ofAnarka.
So
SPEAKER_00 (32:16):
where can people get your book?
Just about anywhere.
all the usual places.
It's been very gratifying to seea lot of independent bookstores
giving it prominent shelf space.
You can go online and order itsurely, but it's also at these
independent bookstores that aredoing God's work out there
selling books day by day.
SPEAKER_03 (32:31):
That's great.
Well, thank you so much, JC, forjoining us today.
And thanks to Amy for sharingher views and her insights and
some special tidbits about herspecial brother.
Thank you.
Thanks so much.
Thanks for joining us in ourpodcast today.
Be sure to check us out at ourwebsite at
(32:51):
www.2blackmomsandamic.com, wherewe hope that you will subscribe.
You can also hear this and ourother podcasts on Google
Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio,Amazon Audible, and Podchaser.
If you like what you hear, wehope you'll give a great review.
SPEAKER_02 (33:10):
Hey, thanks for joining us today.
This is Glenda.
And this is Lisa.
Two black moms in a mic andwe're signing off.
Hi, I'm Glenda.
And I'm Lisa.
And we are Two Black Moms and aMic.
Between us, we have six kids,four boys and two girls.
SPEAKER_03 (00:12):
And we're here to talk to you about everything
from diapers to degrees.
Welcome to our podcast.
Welcome to our podcast.
Today, we're so delighted tohave J.C.
Hallman.
J.C.
is a highly respected author whohas numerous published books.
In addition, J.C.
has published a book of shortstories and edited two
(00:33):
anthologies of creativecriticism.
And he's the recipient of a 2010McKnight Artist Fellowship in
Fiction and a 2013 fellowshipfrom the John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation in the generalnonfiction category.
But today we want to talk to himabout his current book, Say
(00:53):
Anarka, which just came out thissummer.
And this book has gotten a lotof exceptional reviews by many
outlets, including the New YorkTimes.
And he was recently interviewedabout his book on National
Public Radio.
Welcome, J.C., Hey there.
Thank you so much for having me.
Great.
We're really excited that you'rehere today.
And I read through your book.
(01:15):
Your research and your book aretruly, truly fascinating, but
also very disturbing andtraumatizing to read about
Anarcha.
And for our audience, I justwant to summarize that your book
documents the use of enslavedwomen who were forced to undergo
experimental gynecologicalsurgeries in 19th century
Alabama.
(01:36):
And these surgeries wereperformed by a male surgeon who
achieved great acclaim, but atthe expense of so many
African-American women who weresubjected to incredible painful
experiences.
So this book really exposes alot about this highly acclaimed
surgeon.
surgeon.
Can you tell us more about yourbook and about the premise?
(01:57):
Sure.
I mean, I think
SPEAKER_00 (01:58):
just to address kind of the difficulty of the book,
this is definitely not a cozyread, right?
Right.
And the way I thought of thatwas that I just kept coming back
to this line in my head thatreading is a form of bearing
witness.
And here was this really, reallyimportant and often overlooked
moment in the history ofmedicine, which informs the
world that we live in, in a lotof different ways.
(02:21):
And so I approached the book ina very unflinching way, knowing
that it was going to be a veryheavy and even difficult read,
but a necessary one tounderstand the world we live in,
both in terms of the ongoingwhite supremacist mindset that
continues to infect the countryand in terms of coming to a
(02:41):
deeper understanding about thehealth inequities that afflict
the modern medical world.
SPEAKER_03 (02:46):
Yeah, it really touches a lot of emotional
points, at least for me when Iwas reading it.
Can you tell us something alittle bit more about Anarka
herself and how you came to findout about her and what intrigued
you about her story?
SPEAKER_00 (03:02):
Sure.
So the origin story for me andmy journey with the book is not
very interesting.
I just stumbled across the termvesicovaginal fistula, which is
a term for the condition thatAnarka and a number of other
women suffered from in the 1840sthat were the center of the
story, the birth story of modernwomen's health.
(03:22):
Let's
SPEAKER_03 (03:23):
just to clarify, because I had to look
SPEAKER_00 (03:49):
that up.
And that hole can be between thevagina and the rectum.
It can be with the bladder.
It can be with the urethra.
And so vesicovaginal fistula,the term that usually gets used
for this, is an abnormal openingbetween the bladder and the
vagina.
It is a horrific condition.
(04:09):
And it is a condition thatcontinues to affect the
developing world and Africatoday.
And so...
It caught my attention because Isaw that this story, the ongoing
health crisis in Africa, wasconnected to the story of the
birth of modern women's health.
That what looked like twostories, because people were
(04:31):
already talking about this.
They knew about Anarka.
They knew about this doctor whohad performed a series of
experiments on Anarka andapproximately 10 other women in
downtown Montgomery, Alabama.
But this line of connection fromthat story, this group of
enslaved teenagers in Alabama towhat's happening in Africa today
and to the connections toeverything we're talking about
(04:53):
today in terms of healthinequities in the United States
and in the developed world.
It was all one story.
Yeah.
So finding a way to tell thestory from the past in a way
that connected to the modernmoment was essential for me.
SPEAKER_03 (05:07):
So how did you find that out, though, about
Anarchist's story specifically?
I mean, it's an incredible readbecause on the one hand, I feel
like I'm reading fiction becauseit's so detailed.
The Day to Day of the YoungWomen, Dr.
Sims.
It's almost like I'm readingfiction, but I'm not because I
know that it's like a realstory.
Yeah.
So how did you do your research?
(05:28):
So there's a lot of questions inthere already.
SPEAKER_00 (05:30):
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the book reads like anovel, but it's not.
It's narrative.
It's a narrative nonfiction.
And, you know, there was so muchabout the story that there were
so many complexities to thestory that I thought that the
way it needed to be approachedwas as a story, not as a or an
academic study.
Those works had been done.
(05:51):
Yeah, because I think that's whyit got me in.
It brought me in.
Right, right.
Because of the way that it'swritten.
Yeah, yeah.
I thought that it needed to be astory that you inhabited.
Yeah.
You felt.
You needed to feel the presenceof these people.
You needed to feel thecomplexities of the situations
at those critical moments whenparticularly controversial
things were happening.
You needed to feel it and notjust hear about it.
(06:12):
And so that's why I approachedit.
And to answer your firstquestion, you know, when I first
was trying to discover whatvesicovaginal was, your Googling
just immediately heads to thisstory.
It was, again, that connectionfrom the ongoing health crisis
in Africa to the story of J.
Marion Sims and the experimentsthat he performed.
He's considered the father ofgynecology.
(06:32):
So this was the critical moment.
And he started the first women'shospital in New York, right?
He's a founder.
That's something he gets creditfor.
But it turned out that thishospital that he started in New
York, he left Alabama in 1853and founded a new hospital in
1855.
And that's why there was astatue to him in New York City.
He sometimes gets credit forstarting this new hospital for
(06:55):
women, the first hospital forwomen in the United States and
maybe the world.
There's debates about that.
But ultimately, even thathospital in New York was just
another field of experimentationfor him.
He traded experimenting onenslaved women in Alabama for
experimenting on Irishimmigrants.
SPEAKER_03 (07:13):
Wow.
In New York City.
He went from African-Americanwomen to Irish immigrants.
SPEAKER_00 (07:18):
Right.
Which is not a parallel.
There is no way in which Irishwomen, Irish immigrants are
enslaved.
They are free people.
Yeah.
But this was also a very, veryvulnerable population.
These were women who had escapedthe potato famine on board what
were called coffin ships.
And so they come to the UnitedStates.
They land in New York.
They're poor.
And there was definitelyclassism against the Irish in
(07:40):
New York City at this time.
It was trading one vulnerablepopulation for another.
But it's important to make thatdistinction and not pretend like
Irish immigrants were theequivalent of the enslaved
population in the United States.
That's just not the case.
SPEAKER_03 (07:53):
So I mentioned earlier that the first of your
stories about anarcha werepublished in Harper magazine.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it was caught by, I guess,Mayor de Blasio's people.
So what happened back in 2017 isbefore the book was published.
It's a little more complicated
SPEAKER_00 (08:10):
than that because there were these groups of
women's groups andAfrican-American groups that
have been protesting thismonument in New York for the
better part of a decade.
And I came along much later andI was more or less covering what
these groups were doing by wayof protesting that monument in
New York City.
It was all happening kind ofbefore the monument debate
started to happen and pitchedHarper's, I'm going to write a
(08:32):
biography of this monument.
And of course, it talked aboutAnarcha and Sims.
But it was finished, you know,in early 2017.
And that's more or less rightwhen Confederate monuments
started to come down all acrossthe country.
And Harper's was just holding onto the article.
And then the real thing thathappened is the white
nationalist march inCharlottesville over monuments.
(08:54):
And there was a death and thatbecame hugely controversial.
And then those groups in NewYork, they staged another
protest at the site of the Simsmonument a week later.
And this time the Sims storywent absolutely viral.
And that gave Harper's justenough time to take my already
completed article and put it onthe cover of the magazine.
So when that debate in New Yorkboiled over and de Blasio
(09:15):
announced this 90-day commissionto reconsider New York's policy
on monuments, the magazine hadjust enough time to put it out
so that we could get it to themembers of the commission that
were considering this question.
But it's most accurate to saythat that article played a
backup role to the women andblack youth groups in particular
that had been protesting thatstatue for a decade and had been
(09:38):
getting totally stonewalled by anumber of institutions in New
York City.
SPEAKER_03 (09:42):
Yeah, because I didn't know until, you know, I
kind of got up to speed aboutAnarka's story.
So that's pretty incredible.
So I wanted to turn ourattention.
We've talked some about Anarka,but what about her story,
though?
I mean, because she wasexperimented on as a young woman
and there were a number of otherwomen experimented on.
What were those women supposedto do otherwise if they suffered
(10:06):
from this
SPEAKER_00 (10:06):
fistula?
The first thing I'll say is thatAnarka has always been a kind of
a ghostly figure in historybecause for many years, for
decades, the only source thatwas known about her, that told
us anything at all about her,was Sims himself.
He was not a reliable source.
Everybody understood that he wasa self-promoter and a
self-aggrandizer, and he was theonly source.
(10:28):
So even though people had beenthinking and writing about her
for some time, likening her caseto Henrietta Lacks, for example,
Yeah.
(11:05):
And so my book is based ondozens, hundreds of sources
about Anarka's life that are notfound in any other source.
And to come back around to thelatter part of your question,
Sims gets credit for being thefirst doctor to cure obstetric
fistula.
That's the narrative you'll seeif you go looking for this.
That's what I found when I firstGoogled it, though it stunk for
(11:28):
me right from the beginning.
And what I found is that it'sjust not true.
You know, he wasn't the first tocure this condition.
And even the cure that heclaimed on Anarka was for a
device that was abandoned just afew years after he published it.
So there was a lot of falsehoodsabout this narrative that were
just embedded in the history.
But the truth at the time isthat This was a very horrific
(11:50):
condition.
It's one of the worst thingsthat can happen to a woman's
body.
And there wasn't many options,just as there's not many options
for women today in Africa whowind up with this condition in
very remote areas or who arerequired by policies of wife
seclusion to stay on the familyhomestead and never leave.
What this means, though, forAnarka and the others is beyond
(12:13):
being enslaved persons who couldnot provide informed consent for
medical experimentation.
it meant that they were also anincredibly vulnerable
population, vulnerable tocoercion.
Because women who have thiscondition would want to be
cured, but that means they wouldbe vulnerable to the false or
exaggerated promises of someonewho comes along and says, well,
(12:33):
I can cure you.
A terribly horrific condition.
And at the time, there would nothave been many options.
And women who have thiscondition often wind up being
ostracized by their families andtheir communities.
Husbands leave them.
They lose everything.
It's a truly brutal conditionand there would not have been
many options at the time.
SPEAKER_03 (12:50):
Does Anarka have descendants that you're aware
of?
And if so, did you communicatewith them at all or the
descendants of any of the otherwomen that were operated on by
Dr.
Sims?
In the beginning of your book,you outline, and it's a lot of
people who contributed to thebook and to the compilation of
(13:10):
information who have sincepassed away, right?
The long list of names.
Were you ever able to reach anyof the descendants of Anarka or
of those women who weresubjected to Dr.
Simms?
SPEAKER_00 (13:22):
The first part is that the way I told Anarka's
story was by combining thisprimary source scaffold of her
life, all these dozens ofsources.
But that was more like askeleton.
And so to give her life a senseof passion and presence and
atmosphere, I called on the WPAslave narratives, the interviews
with thousands of formerlyenslaved persons, to call on the
(13:46):
details of people who wereAnarka's contemporaries,
recollecting many years laterwhat their lives as enslaved
persons were like.
And so, yeah, I credit all ofthe individuals whose narratives
I called on to contribute to thetelling of Anarka's story in
that way at the front of thebook.
Just to
SPEAKER_03 (14:02):
read those pages right up front, center, to me
was just really chilling.
Yeah,
SPEAKER_00 (14:07):
it was really important to us.
My name's not on the front ofthe book.
There's no dedication.
There's no acknowledgement page.
We really wanted to pull all theattention to those names and, of
course, to Anarka's name on thecover.
SPEAKER_03 (14:17):
Yeah.
And how long did it take you topull all of this information and
write your book?
It
SPEAKER_00 (14:23):
was about eight, nine years.
Man, wow.
It was a long time.
It was a long haul.
But I want to go back to yourquestion about descendants
because that is reallyfascinating.
I was able to calculate thatAnarka had a total of 10
pregnancies that came to termover her lifetime.
And she died quite young,probably at around 45, 47.
(14:45):
It's not 100% clear exactly whenshe was born, so guesses about
her age are just that.
They're estimations.
So she had four children livingwith her when she died.
It appears that those childrendid not go on to leave children
behind of their own.
But she's buried alongside theman who was her husband at the
end, a man named LorenzoJackson.
You know, as I said, I followedher life story.
(15:07):
We followed the story all theway to her gravesite, a marked
grave in a lonely forest inVirginia.
And so her husband had adaughter by a previous partner.
Anarka had a daughter.
And these two daughters becamevery close.
They moved to Washington, D.C.
They lived together here fortheir entire lives and were
very, very close.
Were family in every way butblood.
(15:29):
That daughter of Lorenzo, Luisa,she left behind children.
we have located descendants ofthat part of the family.
Wow, that's amazing.
And so we're now making aneffort to make sure that her
grave site is protected and thatthose descendants have access to
it.
When I contacted them, they knewthat this had existed and they
(15:50):
knew there were rumors thatthere was a significant person.
So they had rumors of her story.
Yeah, but they didn't know much.
But the location of this gravehad been lost completely.
Some time ago, I escorted one ofthose descendants out to the
gravesite.
I'm going to be doing so againvery soon.
Oh, that's wonderful.
That's really inspiring.
SPEAKER_03 (16:09):
And I want to talk a little bit, too, about Dr.
Sims and his colleagues.
They had to know that he wassketchy.
Did you get a sense of thereaction of his colleagues to
him?
SPEAKER_00 (16:20):
Yeah.
As I said, you know, in 2017,the Sims story went viral as a
result of that protest.
And there has been concern sincethen, as the story has become
more controversial, that Simsalways had his champions and his
apologists.
That's true even today.
And those folks have tended tolook at what's happening now,
and they worry that we'reprojecting modern values into
(16:43):
the past, which is like ahistorical no-no.
You're not supposed to do that.
When I'm critical of Sims, whatI'm doing is I'm relying on his
contemporary critics, that therewere a number of doctors, many
doctors, who were very concernedabout Sims' methods and his
ethics and his efforts to makehimself wealthy and famous.
And the amazing thing is thathis greatest critics, the people
(17:06):
who were most critical of him,were the ones who knew him best,
his assistants.
He had an assistant in Alabamanamed Nathan Bozeman, and he had
an assistant in New York Citynamed Thomas Addis Emmett.
So his greatest critics were thedoctors who were sitting right
beside him as he worked.
And it is those voices that I'mcalling on to recreate the story
(17:29):
of his rise to fame and thecontroversies that he triggered
even in his own lifetime.
Once again, it is not usprojecting modern values into
the past.
It's us listening to the voicesof the past, warning us about
the future that this guy wasbringing in.
SPEAKER_03 (17:44):
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's so insightful.
Tell us, why should we read thisbook?
SPEAKER_00 (17:50):
Again, I think it goes back to that question of
recognizing that it's not justthis moment from the past.
It's not just a quirky part ofhistory.
We are living with the effectsof this particular past.
And I think, like right now, forexample, we're living under a
time when women's bodilyautonomy is under as great a
threat And if we truly want toundermine that, then the thing
(18:14):
we should do is go back andundermine the legacies of the
first people who tried to takeaway that autonomy.
Yes.
And if you want to truly changethe trajectory of where we are
now and where we're going, thenyou have to go all the way back
to the beginning and affect thattrajectory from where it truly
began.
And J.
Marion Sims really doesrepresent this crux moment of a
(18:38):
sort of fulcrum moment in thehistory of medicine.
And so I think that, again,going back to that idea of
reading being a form of bearingwitness.
that this is the thing that canultimately help us chart a
better future.
The way to chart a better futurebegins in the past.
SPEAKER_03 (18:53):
Yeah, it's interesting that you make that
connection because, I mean,there's so many incidences in
history where humans are usedfor quote unquote medical
purposes, but just kind ofbutchered up.
I mean, we know about the use ofpeople in Tuskegee and for
syphilis experimentation.
And recently, HarvardUniversity, I was reading,
(19:14):
admitted to having humans ofNative Americans for human
experimentation from many, manyyears ago, but that they still
have human remains in theirlaboratories and now are
beginning to reach out tofamilies, maybe in the last few
years, reaching out to familiesto return the human remains to
the families.
(19:35):
So this is an issue that isclearly an historical issue, but
still has present implicationsin the many ways that you've
discussed and this story aboutHarvard returning human remains
is very unsettling, I wouldthink, for most people.
And these were Native Americanhuman remains, principally.
SPEAKER_00 (19:54):
Can I respond?
I think there's a lot to saythere about Sim's role in that.
I think that simultaneously, asa guy who was seeking the status
of being a surgical pioneer byperforming experiments on human
beings, he was paving the wayfor a lot of even worse
atrocities that came along afterhim.
As I said, there were plenty ofpeople who were calling for
(20:16):
medical ethics at the time andwho were expressing concern
about consent andexperimentation in the 1850s.
But there was this other cadrethat just really felt like the
ends justified the means.
And you see that, the fame thatSims accrued and the way that
his legacy was solidified into arhetorical facade, literally the
(20:37):
father of gynecology, but thenalso literal facades in terms of
the monuments that were createdto him, that this, in And that
inspired many others to followin those footsteps.
And that was a very whitesupremacist informed agenda that
gave people a kind of quasilogical and sort of emboldened
(20:58):
them
SPEAKER_03 (20:59):
to
SPEAKER_00 (20:59):
prey on vulnerable people.
Right.
It really feeds directly intothe history of scientific racism
and it feeds later into themovement of early 20th century
eugenics.
There are many, many ways inwhich people were following
these particular footsteps.
And what's important toremember, though, is that is
that it isn't just Sims.
I argue in the introduction ofthe book that Anarka is a
symbol.
I'm presenting her as a symboliccharacter symbol.
(21:21):
She's a kind of composite figurewho is symbolic of a lot of
other women who sufferedalongside her and who suffered
at the hands of other doctors.
But Sims too is a kind of symbolbecause it's not just him.
It was the entire male medicalestablishment that was a lot of
them wanting to follow exactlyin his footsteps.
Though again, it was otherdoctors who were raising
(21:43):
concerns about This has
SPEAKER_03 (21:51):
been a great conversation.
And now we've got a specialguest.
So we have Amy Hallman, and thisis JC's sister, who is also a
law school classmate of mine atUVA.
Amy is an attorney in San Diego.
We have her as our guest todayto kind of fill out even more
these issues of JC's disclosuresfrom the book and issues of
(22:16):
health inequity.
So Amy, thank you for being withus today.
SPEAKER_01 (22:20):
Thanks for having me.
Good to see
SPEAKER_03 (22:22):
you.
I know, good to see you too.
So Tell me, as the sister ofJ.C., what were your
observations when he was doinghis research for this incredible
book?
SPEAKER_01 (22:35):
Well, I've watched his career for 20 years now, and
I think this book in particularhas been such a passion project
for him.
And about three years ago duringthe pandemic, he was towards the
end of writing the book and hecame out to visit me and was
staying with me.
And I just, you know, waswatching him writing the end of
(22:55):
the book and just kind ofbearing witness to that was
really special for me.
And it was kind of the firsttime I got as invested in one of
his books as I have.
And now I'm really like helpingto market it and it's become a
passion project of my own.
SPEAKER_03 (23:12):
That's great.
And to me, you know, gynecologyIt's just so personal for women
and kind of treacherous thingsthat like Anarka and the other
women were subjected to werejust so personal and just so
enraging.
What is your takeaways wherethat's concerned?
I mean, it is on many levelsjust sort of such a personal
(23:34):
topic.
SPEAKER_01 (23:35):
Yeah, it's hard to read the book and not just cry.
Some of my friends who have readit have said, I'm listening to
the audible.
I have to stop.
I have to take a break.
What she's gone through.
It's just so I can't evenimagine.
It's so heart wrenching.
SPEAKER_03 (23:51):
And the thing is, like, because I know some people
don't like to read difficultbooks or watch difficult movies,
but I think we have anobligation.
SPEAKER_01 (23:58):
Yes.
SPEAKER_03 (23:58):
Yes.
You know, we have to educateourselves.
We have to know who the playerswere.
Yeah.
We have to know how the victimssuffered.
Right.
So that we can guard against ithappening, you know, again.
And I think.
I think J.C.
raised the issue of the wholeabortion
SPEAKER_01 (24:37):
debate.
Yeah.
And help us recognize that, youknow, she really and the others,
too, but she was experimentedon, you know, more than 30
times.
Yeah.
She was the most consequentialof them.
And to have gone through that.
I mean, it's amazing she
SPEAKER_03 (24:54):
survived it, quite honestly.
SPEAKER_01 (24:56):
Yes.
Yes.
And to give her rightful placeand to recognize that, you know,
we really all have a debt toher.
That's
SPEAKER_03 (25:04):
so
SPEAKER_01 (25:04):
true.
Because, you know, in thiscountry, the conditions
eradicated.
That's not the case.
In Africa.
No, it's not.
Right.
SPEAKER_00 (25:12):
Can I pop in there?
Thank you to my sister forspeaking so movingly.
Thank you.
It means a great deal to me thatthe book has come to mean so
much to her.
Thank you so much.
(25:51):
is affecting lives in good waystoday, though it has to be
acknowledged that came at theprice of snatching away a field
of medicine that hadtraditionally been for women,
midwifery.
But it's also accurate to saythere was one clinical advance
that came out of the Alabamafistula experiments.
Anarka and Lucy and Betsy andthe seven others who formed the
(26:13):
initial core of experimentalsubjects, they were gathered
together.
They lived together.
They cared for one anotherduring the extended aftercare
period that was required forthis condition.
They went on to become nursesand assistants when Sims'
medical students and hiscolleagues abandoned him in
Alabama.
Anarka had been a nurse before,during, and after the fistula
experiments.
which is another sort of newrevelation from the book.
(26:36):
But this was the thing thattraveled.
These young women pioneering apatient-centered model of care
where women live together, carefor one another, and eventually
become complicit in their owncures.
That's the thing that moved toNew York City and then inspired
a very famous fistula hospitalin Ethiopia, the Addis Ababa
Fistula Hospital.
And there's a plaque on the wallsaying, oh, this hospital was
(26:57):
inspired by J.
Marion Sims.
And then that hospital inspiredclinics all over the The truth
here is not that Sims inspiredit, because what they did in
Ethiopia is they did the samething Sims did.
They took the women who werefistula survivors and they
turned them into nurses andassistants and caregivers.
And in 2018, afterward for thebook about all of this, I went
(27:19):
to Ethiopia and Nigeria andUganda to see these women who
were like hundreds of anarchistsliving today, doing just what
these young women in Alabama haddone.
That's the thing that istransforming lives today.
There are millions and millionsof women who suffer from this
condition and have terrible lifeconditions, but some of them are
(27:40):
being cured.
And the thing to recognize, thething that I wanted my book to
nail down completely was thatthat advance that came out of
the Alabama fistula experimentsthat owes nothing to J.
Marion Sims and it oweseverything to this small group
of enslaved teenagers fromAlabama.
Wow, that's amazing.
SPEAKER_03 (27:57):
And I just to kind of take that idea and then fast
forward a bit to where we aretoday with health inequities.
I mean, you know, you readabout, you know, women of means
who are not given full access tohealth care, not listened to
when they're in healthfacilities.
And then you read about, youknow, clinical trials that may,
you know, not include women or,you know, minority women in
(28:20):
particular when trying to findadvances in medicine to cure,
say, the heart ailments or otherinternal organ ailments.
So I think that the story ofAnarka that you've made
available now to the world kindof feeds into the fact that all
of these issues are importantfor the whole country, for
everyone, for women and for men,regardless of your age and your
(28:41):
race, your national origins, sothat we have a healthcare system
that, you know, is accountableto all of us.
And so I think it seems like tome, the story of Anarka kind of
helps us get closer to that kindof ideal.
How do you feel about that, Amy?
SPEAKER_01 (28:56):
Yeah, I think that's definitely the case.
SPEAKER_00 (28:58):
I think there are a number of great examples of
prominent African-American womenwho find that they don't get the
same kind of health care asMarina Williams.
And in less famous cases, Dr.
Susan Moore in Ohio, who wasdenied pain medication while she
was dying of COVID.
She was a physician.
Oh my God.
And she is in the hospital.
She's a medical doctor and she'sdenied pain medication.
(29:21):
She doesn't die from not beinggiven pain medication, but on a
kind of palliative level, shewasn't believed.
And she said very bluntly thatthey treated her like she was a
drug addict.
You know, then there was just arecent story about involuntary
hysterectomies happening.
I think it was in SouthCarolina.
It was just a few years ago.
Yeah.
Right.
(30:07):
And he very likely believedthat.
But to say that, where does thatcome from in his history?
It actually doesn't come fromhim.
It comes from his biographer.
(30:28):
a guy who wrote the onlyfull-length biography of J.
Marion Sims.
And this guy said it verybluntly, said that black women
have a resistance to pain bredinto them by generations of
servitude on and on and on.
And he said that not in 1850.
He said that in 1950.
Oh, my gosh.
So just recognizing, again, thatit's not just Sims.
It is that mindset that createdand sustained his facade.
(30:51):
And that is the thing that istrickling down to the modern
moment.
SPEAKER_03 (30:54):
All I can say is, you know, you can't change minds
overnight, but we can educate.
And oh, and one last thing I dohave to ask you.
Why do you call it Say
SPEAKER_00 (31:02):
Anarka?
I'm thinking of the Say Her Namemovement, right?
You know, I think that the ideathat all anybody knew was her
name for a long time.
There was a moment in one of theprotests at the site of the Sims
Monument where those protesterswere walking up Fifth Avenue,
blocking traffic, chanting, SayHer Name, Anarka, Say Her Name.
Oh, wow.
(31:22):
Say Her Name, Betsy.
So they said, Say Her Name, SayAnarka.
Oh, yeah.
And so I wanted to cite that.
And then as well, you know, Ithink in that block of names
we're talking about at thebeginning, right?
That to talk about theimportance of names.
And then I would say evenduring, throughout the book,
there are times when I'm talkingabout groups of enslaved people
and sometimes it just becomes alist of names.
(31:45):
And I think that symbolicallythat anthem, say her name or say
their names, say his name,George Floyd, this becomes a way
of asserting loudly that we'renot going to forget.
SPEAKER_03 (31:57):
Wow.
Well, this, it's an incrediblebook and I can't say enough
about how enlightening it is.
You learn so much about ourhistory and it's easy to read,
to be honest with you.
I mean, it's a very easy way tolearn more about our history and
to learn about the sacrifices ofAnarka.
So
SPEAKER_00 (32:16):
where can people get your book?
Just about anywhere.
all the usual places.
It's been very gratifying to seea lot of independent bookstores
giving it prominent shelf space.
You can go online and order itsurely, but it's also at these
independent bookstores that aredoing God's work out there
selling books day by day.
SPEAKER_03 (32:31):
That's great.
Well, thank you so much, JC, forjoining us today.
And thanks to Amy for sharingher views and her insights and
some special tidbits about herspecial brother.
Thank you.
Thanks so much.
Thanks for joining us in ourpodcast today.
Be sure to check us out at ourwebsite at
(32:51):
www.2blackmomsandamic.com, wherewe hope that you will subscribe.
You can also hear this and ourother podcasts on Google
Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio,Amazon Audible, and Podchaser.
If you like what you hear, wehope you'll give a great review.
SPEAKER_02 (33:10):
Hey, thanks for joining us today.
This is Glenda.
And this is Lisa.
Two black moms in a mic andwe're signing off.
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