Anarcha Westcott and the Birth of Modern Gynecology: The Pain They Chose Not to Feel

They called him the Father of Modern Gynecology.

They called her a slave girl.

Only one of them was given anesthesia.

In the 1840s, in Montgomery, Alabama, a young enslaved woman named Anarcha Westcott was forced to undergo a series of experimental surgeries performed by a white physician named Dr. J. Marion Sims. She was seventeen years old.

After a prolonged and traumatic childbirth, Anarcha developed a condition known as a vesicovaginal fistula, a tear between the bladder and vaginal wall that left her incontinent and in constant pain. It was a condition that devastated countless women in the 19th century, but enslaved women like Anarcha had no access to care and no right to say no.

Dr. Sims wanted to find a cure.

But he didn’t look for volunteers.

He bought them.

The Experiments

Between 1845 and 1849, Sims performed dozens of surgeries on Anarcha, and on at least two other enslaved women, Lucy and Betsey. They were operated on repeatedly, without anesthesia, while other white doctors watched.

Sims justified this by claiming that “Black women didn’t feel pain the same way white women did.”

It was a lie rooted in racism and convenience.

Anarcha was subjected to over 30 operations as Sims experimented on her body to perfect his technique. He eventually succeeded, repairing her fistula and publishing the results, which would make him famous and celebrated for more than a century.

But the truth is this: Anarcha’s body was the laboratory.

Her suffering became the cornerstone of a medical specialty that would save thousands of women’s lives, while her name was erased from history.

The Cost of Progress

For more than 150 years, medical textbooks praised Sims as a genius innovator. Statues were built in his honour, including one in New York’s Central Park.

But behind every “breakthrough” was the exploitation of Black women who had no autonomy, no rights, and no recognition.

The women endured unimaginable pain, not just from the surgeries, but from the lie that their pain didn’t matter.

Sims later used anesthesia when he performed the same operations on white women.

He knew it existed. He just chose not to use it.

Remembering Anarcha

Today, historians, activists, and artists are reclaiming Anarcha’s story. Her name, alongside Lucy and Betsey, now appears on memorials, in murals, and in movements demanding equity in women’s health.

Her courage exposes the roots of a system that still, to this day, doubts women’s pain, especially Black women’s.

When women are dismissed, told “it’s just hormones,” or “it’s all in your head,” the echo of Anarcha’s story is still there.

We cannot rewrite history, but we can tell the truth about it.

Modern gynecology was not born from brilliance alone. It was born from suffering. And now, that truth belongs to us, not to the men who took credit for it.

Reclaiming the Narrative

To speak Anarcha’s name is to reclaim what was stolen: dignity, voice, and the right to bodily autonomy.

The Dangerous Age isn’t just about midlife, it’s about every age when women were told their pain was a problem to be fixed, not a story to be heard.

So we say their names now, not as patients, not as property but as the women who bore the weight of medicine and still refused to disappear.

Anarcha. Lucy. Betsey.

The true mothers of modern gynecology.

The Silence That Still Echoes

As I dug for more information on Lucy and Betsey, I was met with a haunting reality, the archives are mostly silent. No surviving records list their last names. Sims’s own writings referred to them only by their first names, omitting any detail of who they were beyond his experiments.

Historical sources from the Smithsonian, PubMed, and the Women & the American Story project confirm what that silence means: most enslaved women were recorded without surnames. Their names were altered, lost, or deliberately erased.

Later historians note that “Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy, and nine other unidentified enslaved women and girls” were among Sims’s patients a reminder that many remain entirely unnamed.

And that’s the point. Their identities were never meant to survive.

The fact that we only have first names is not just a historical footnote, it’s a reflection of how enslaved women were dehumanized, diminished, and deleted from the narrative. Their bodies built a medical specialty, but their lives were reduced to case studies.

When we speak their names, Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, we resist that erasure.

We say: you were here.

You mattered.

Your pain built something that should have saved women, not silenced them.

And in speaking them, we begin to write them back into history, where they always belonged.

Please share this so we can make others aware of this horrific part of our history.