Gynecology in today’s world has helped millions of women. The fact that women have access in today’s world to their reproductive health and to their bodies shows that reproductive medicine has gone a long way. Women had only begun to gain rights in this past century in the United States, but now leading that they have access to many different kinds of healthcare so they can educate themselves on their bodily autonomy and their reproductive health shows that the field has made many medical advancements from where they first were at to the reproductive healthcare now. Gynecology was a medical specialty that began to shape in the 19th century. J. Marion Sims is known as the “father of modern gynecology.” Though his title is a mask for many of his unethical practices on enslaved Black women to get gynecology to where it is at in the modern day. His title as the father is highly controversial since his medical breakthroughs were highly cruel and unjust towards enslaved Black women. The exploitation of Black women helped shape the field of gynecology in the 19th century. This reveals how medical racism has helped found reproductive healthcare and medicine today.
Modern gynecology stemmed from the 18th century. In the South, slave culture was deeply embedded in the culture and practices. They did not only rely on the enslavement of Black people in their economy, but as science and medicine had advanced in the 18th century, doctors had needed people to practice their experimentation on so that the white slave owners could eventually have access to safe and approved healthcare. Enslaved people were treated as property instead of humans. This was significant to slave owners since this meant that their bodies could be used for medical experiments without any moral and legal consequences. This was a very inhumane way of going about practicing new and upcoming medical procedures on enslaved people. Medical schools and doctors had relied on enslaved Black people to study diseases, test upcoming medical practices, and to help train new doctors. These medical professionals at the time had relied on the idea of Black bodies being more tolerable to pain and just as property to justify their actions. They had zero consequence to their actions since enslaved Black people were not considered to be fully human at the time. This racist idea of them took away their right to consent and had their doubts and objections for being test subjects to white doctors and students dismissed. This led to the idea of medical racism in this time. This was shaped as well by the racist ideas and theories that doctors had portrayed Black people as biologically inferior. The main root of these racist ideas had made people believe that Black people could physically handle more than white people. Though they could not mentally comprehend as much, such as giving out consent, was disregarded due to this. A big myth of this racist mentality was that in women, Black women could handle more pain than white women. This led to the gynecology field advancing from the 19th century to what it is today. These ideas led to the inhuman treatment of and practices of Black women in the gynecology field.
J. Marion Sims was considered to be the “father of modern gynecology.” This reinforces the idea of his practices to get to that title at the time as ethical and of a good cause. Sims had made it a goal to cure vesicovaginal fistula. This is a severe childbirth injury that causes urinary problems in women. A vesicovaginal fistula is an abnormal opening between the bladder and the vagina that caused urine leakage. This causes continuous urinary leakage and is humiliating for so many women. As Sims’s goal was to cure this, between 1845 and 1849 he had developed a surgical technique to repair this injury. Though he had years of trial and error to perfecting his technique on enslaved Black women. He had built a mock hospital in the back of his home in Montgomery, Alabama, where he performed multiple surgeries on enslaved Black women. Some of the women he had performed on had to be tested on multiple times.
