Surgical Experimentation by John Marion Sims in the Pre-Anaesthetic Era

The reputation of the pioneering gynaecologist J Marion Sims has been brought into question by a scandal over experimental surgery on African American slave women. Sims attempted to find a surgical cure for vesico-vaginal fistulae - an obstetric injury resulting from bladder damage after obstructed labour. His statue was removed from Central Park, New York, in 2018 in deference to the public outcry regarding his racist behaviour. A debate has raged over failures of consent for up to 30 procedures on a single patient which were performed without anaesthesia on vulnerable young slave women. However, this may be an example of "presentism" whereby the "beliefs, attitudes and practices of the 21st century are anachronistically projected retrograde to the early 19th century". This column argues that there are two separate issues: namely, the proposition that slaves could not freely give consent and that the surgery was deliberately tantamount to torture. In the 1850s United States slaves had no civil rights and no adequate anaesthesia was available during the period of surgical experimentation between 1841 and 1845.