The Price Slave Women Paid For The “Birth” Of Modern Gynecology
If taking a stroll through New York’s Central Park, one might see the statue of Dr. James Marion Sims. Known as the “father of gynecology,” His greatest achievement and claim to fame was curing the problem of the vesico-vaginal fistula. However, controversy exists because he found his surgical cure, use of silver sutures and speculum from performing a number of trial and error procedures on slave women from 1845 to 1849.
Since the mid- twentieth century, academia has debated whether Sims was an ingenuous doctor who furthered the progression of medical science for women or a 19th monster who conducted painful unethical experiments on women who couldn’t say “No.”
In 1993 Durrenda Ojanuga, Ph.D. wrote that the problem with Sims’ experiments were that he used the institution of slavery to harbor human guinea pigs to perfect his procedures. Violating all concepts of human rights and medical ethics, the women were property subject to Sims’ trial and error experiments.
According to Ojanuga, such slave experimentation was not popular at the time. Rumors and whispers even began to circulate around town about the young doctor who kept experimental slaves. Other doctors would engage in experiments often using white patients with informed consent, according to Ojanuga. The slave women possessed no agency, no means to deny the upwards 30 operations endured for four years each. As property of their master, it was he who determined that they should be submitted to experimentation, not them.
Ojanuga writes that after the procedure was perfected, White women wanted the vesico- vaginal fistula operation as well. However, no White woman could endure the operation without anesthesia and it was only after use of anesthetics that Sims was able to do the surgery at the Women’s Hospital he later founded.
Although it was commonly believed that Blacks did not feel the same pain as Whites, the truth was that the slave women, as human chattel, could not cease the operation like the White women. In a time when investigation of almost any malady involving the vagina was considered improper amongst White male doctors, slave women served as the means to further Euro-American medicine due to their subjugated status. Being powerless, they could only endure the extreme pain and embarrassment that was repeatedly administered. Sims experiments are “…a classic example of the evils of slavery,” wrote Ojanuga, “and the misuse of human subjects for medical research.”
If you are interested in more research on the ways in which black women have been exploited by the medical system, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a great read.
never forget white people did nothing first neither the best, they sleep and eat false propaganda,
Ugh, why the shit does that have to turn into a race thing? Why does EVERYTHING have to turn into a race thing?
because white people have made sure that everything is about race
as proved by the fact that when you say explorer, you think of a bunch of white guys walking the world and discovering it ~exotic wonders~ even though Zheng He travelled through Asia, to the Middle East, and even East Africa. But you’d likely never heard of him before.
Same reason you never heard of Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, an Arab traveller who, as early as the 10th century, went to the Volga area for diplomatic reasons. He wrote about it, much as Marco Polo would do later for his own travels, and is one of our sources on what viking were like (and by all accounts, he wrote about them more accurately than western scholars of the same period did)
Oh, or Ibn Battuta who travelled throughout Africa long before europeans did, and even went to Europe himself.
Everything is about race because white people keep telling everyone that their race is the only one who every got anything done.
i have heard of precisely zero non-european explorers ever in my life, and that fucking sucks. this exhibit is amazing and i need to learn more.
That boat is a frickin aircraft carrier comparatively. Holy crap. And no. Never heard a peep.
Zhenghe went to over 40 countries in Asia and Africa and probably went even further, but I didn’t encounter that in history books before. He brought gifts from China to every country he went to and everyone loved him. It was just like “Hey, I’m here with a water-helicarrier and a gift,” and the kings of every country were lilke “holy shit son well here have a giraffe.” There are paintings depicting him leading a giraffe as well. Check him out guys, he’s really cool
That is so awesome. Fuck western history. This is the real shit.
for real. reading the history of the laws (the many laws) written to keep blacks away from anything empowering is quite dizzying and housing discrimination was a big one. laws keeping and taking land from blacks go way back (for example) and as society progressed, it morphed to fit the times. nowadays it’s housing discrimination and it’s rampant.
Shonda Rhimes needs to make a show for Black kids and let him star.
How ironic. I was just talking about this.
This shit is serious. Gentrification is an issue. Housing discrimination is real.
True stories: -A Black family moving into a suburban neighborhood actually would lower the prices of homes. Because all the White people would try to move out as soon as possible. -If the new suburb was next to a non-White neighborhood, a fence could be put up “for safety” to instantly raise property values. -Have you heard the term redline/-ing? It refers to the practice of corporations color coding a region and not investing in or refusing service to those from certain (red) areas. These were usually poor Black neighborhoods. This included refusing those in redlined areas access to jobs, loans, medical care, etc. -Many older developments that were predominately home to poor PoC were destroyed with the promise of a new development or a suburb. This almost never happened and left the country with a shortage of affordable housing that still exists today. -“Between 1934 and 1962, the federal government backed $120 billion of home loans. More than 98% went to whites. Of the 350,000 new homes built with federal support in northern California between 1946 and 1960, fewer than 100 went to African Americans.” http://newsreel.org/guides/race/whiteadv.htm
White people whose family has owned homes since the mid 20th century: The financial success and safety of our families and ourselves is completely based on racism. Never forget that.
This needs more notes. People need to know just how this society made it a point at every turn to hold (and still hold today) Black people down for the benefit of whites.
A huge part of white wealth was created through real estate. A sector that Black people were systematically kept out of. A sector now where Black people are still preyed upon.
White real estate agents also took advantage of racist white homeowners with a practice called blockbusting, where they would encourage them to sell their homes at a loss with just the hint or promise that a black family (or sometimes Jewish or nonblack PoC family, depending on the region) was going to move in.
There were also footnotes on the actual deeds for many houses in white neighborhoods, stipulating that the house was never allowed to be sold or rented to a nonwhite occupant (Jewish people were nearly always considered nonwhite for these purposes). Called restrictive covenants, these were demanded and upheld by white homeowners associations, often with the real threat of violence.
Racist housing discrimination is as American as apple pie at a baseball game.
and this brings us to the current situation where the supreme court is going to take a look at the “Disparate Impact” rule of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. What disparate impact rule does is keep people from trying to discriminate against protected groups in America though subtle means. In our society, racism is very subtle especially when it’s corporate. So instead of putting out a sign that says “whites only” in front of building, a landlord can simply refuse to entertain people with a “Black” sounding name. In doing so they can say that their screening process has nothing to do with race but yet their process negatively impacts Black people and under this rule would be considered illegal. Another example would be banks deciding to issue loans at a higher interest rate to people in a certain part of town and claiming that doing so has nothing to do with race when in fact they are well aware that said part of town is populated by mostly Black people. So again, not blatant, quite subtle but under the disparate impact rule illegal. The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on the legality of this rule and, given their history of gutting civil right protections, could very well strike it down. If that happens, the flood gates of housing discrimination will be wide open and Black people, above all, are going to get hammered.
The case the Supreme Court will here is actually a great example of the subtle racial discrimination and racist practices the rule was made to fight. A Texas state agency awards low-income-housing tax credits to certain developers; a high percentage of this housing winds up being occupied by minorities. The agency, without giving a legitimate reason, granted the tax credits disproportionately to developers who own properties in impoverished, minority-majority neighborhoods. A fair housing group sued, insisting that the agency’s practices had the effect of keeping minorities trapped in minority communities while helping white communities keep minorities out. Simple. A subtle action was taken that had huge negative affect on minorities because where you live is everything in this country. From access to public transportation, healthy foods, clean air, emergency services, well resourced schools, playgrounds, cleanliness and etc are all affect by where you live and if an action is creating a circumstance that keeps a group of people locked in areas where those elements are below average, there’s a problem. Racism and discrimination in this country is subtle as fuck but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist and shouldn’t be fought. What the SCOTUS is going to do is anyone’s guess but I’m not optimistic. We could very well be looking at a long period where Blacks (as well as other minority groups) are going to be preyed upon more viciously than we’ve seen in a very long time.
There’s a bunch of re-blogs of this without the caption, smfh. DO NOT REMOVE THE TEXT ABOVE!! THERE IS VITAL INFORMATION HERE!!!
This is awful but the reality is here in black and white
An Iranian channel ran a story about how a certain kind of martial arts is enjoying increasing popularity among Iranian women. This means that a) Iranian women have rights, b) Iranian women can access the public sphere, c) Iranian women participate in organized, public sports, and d) an Iranian government news channel has no problem with any of this.
Faced with these facts, the Western media panicked: some news agencies resorted to the stereotype of Iranian women as veiled, militant fanatics; others opted for infantilizing portrayals of suffering women using martial arts as their only escape. Can you imagine any self-respecting Western reporter writing a story that explained, unprovoked, the popularity of karate among girls in suburban Los Angeles by citing America’s high rates of sexual assault? Additionally, few bothered to mention that recently it has been Western sports organizations that have prevented Iranian women from playing, for example in 2011 forcing the Iranian women’s soccer team to forfeit hope of reaching the Olympics because they wore sports hijabs on the field.
Narratives of weak or militant Iranian women are not just dishonest; they also fuel a political narrative whereby Islamism is equated with backwardness and the ability of women to reconcile Islamic ideals with feminist goals is entirely obfuscated. Both Western conservatives and many secular feminists often participate in this obfuscation, effectively trying to either hide Iranian women’s successes in order to demonize Iran or by ignoring the ideologies of liberation they have formulated in order to preserve the status of secular feminism as the only path to women’s liberation.
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