The endurance and the determination of the women who were subjected to the experiments of J. Marion Sims, the so-called "Father of Gynecology," take the spotlight alongside revelations of his cruelty and frequent failures in the riveting Say Anarcha by J.C. Hallman. Anarcha was born into enslavement in the mid-1820s on the Westcott plantation in Montgomery, Ala. Her path first crossed with that of Sims when she was a girl and he was tending an Alabama overseer; Anarcha nursed Sims and others through a malaria outbreak. Not long after entering puberty, Anarcha was raped, became pregnant, and suffered a difficult labor, which required surgical intervention. She suffered a double fistula that led to her being treated as "cursed" by others enslaved on the plantation and rendered her unable to work. Sims's experimental surgeries were done without anesthesia and required the patient to hold a position to allow access. Hallman (The Hospital for Bad Poets; The Chess Artist) movingly conveys the endurance and compassion with which Anarcha and the other "cursed women" cared for each other and eventually assisted with each other's surgeries.
Although Sims heralded Anarcha's case as a success for his technique, when she endured another one of his surgeries years later in New York at the Woman's Hospital, there was no sign her fistulae had ever been closed. Hallman makes a convincing case, through investigative diligence augmented by Federal Writers' Project interviews with formerly enslaved people, that Sims's legacy was built on false claims, but offers Anarcha's perseverance as a true pillar of the emergence of modern gynecology. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library