CHAPTER FOURTEEN — ANARCHA IN RICHMOND

[The Anarcha Archive is a series of short essays about the sources for Say Anarcha. A great deal more about the sources can be found at AnarchaArchive.com.]

In the past few essays we’ve been exploring how Anarcha, the most significant of the experimental subjects of the so-called “father of gynecology,” J. Marion Sims, left Alabama.

We saw from case records in New York that she had been experimented on, further, by a man named Charles Bell Gibson.

In other words, the woman who was supposed to have been Sims’s “first cure” wasn’t actually cured.

As we’ll be seeing, that’s going to be true for the rest of her life.

This is Charles Bell Gibson. He was the son of William Gibson, the head of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, which in the early 19th century was the top medical school in the United States.

Sims attended Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia — not quite as good, but it was right at the time William Gibson was performing many high-profile public surgeries.

Charles Bell Gibson, named for a famous English surgeon, Charles Bell, was one of the first surgeons to perform the surgery for obstetric fistula that Sims described in an 1852 paper that even today is considered a classic in the history of medicine.

I’ll be taking that apart in a future essay.

But what the record shows unequivocally is that Charles Bell Gibson experimented on Anarcha several times in Richmond, using chloroform. The question I had after I first saw this document was — okay, but where in Richmond?

That turns out to be here, the Egyptian Building in downtown Richmond, Virginia. Charles Bell Gibson was one of the founders of a new medical school that for a time was located in another part of Virginia, but then it moved in here. For some time, the Egyptian Building was the medical school. It was a hospital too, with facilities for both black and white patients.

And this turns out to be very close to the site of what was known as Lumpkins Jail, an infamous slave pen in Richmond. It’s really just a couple blocks away.

Lumpkins Jail had just become very infamous. It was described in Solomon Northrup’s book 12 Years a Slave. The book was published right at this time, in 1853.

So Gibson would have experimented on Anarcha in the Egyptian Building. There were a couple possible locations inside the building for this, but the most likely is that he would have performed experiments in the main lecture hall, so they could be observed by hundreds of students.

Evidence of the connection between Gibson and Sims isn’t only circumstantial. Gibson’s later lectures on Sims would be recalled by his students.

And many years later, Gibson would write a letter to Sims, during the Civil War. Gibson was the head surgeon for the Army of Virginia. He wrote to Sims to request a donation to aid in the creation of prosthetic devices for the war’s many amputees.

There’s no evidence that Sims ever replied to the letter.

Gibson also knew the Maury family. As we documented in an earlier essay, Anarcha came to be owned by a man named William L. Maury, cousin to Matthew Fontaine Maury, the “father of oceanography.”

Incidentally, Matthew Fontaine Maury’s statue in Montgomery was recently removed, just like Sims’s statue in New York City.

As we revealed in an earlier essay, there were Maurys all across the country: New York, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama. And there was a prominent Maury who lived right here. This, also, is just a couple of blocks away from the Egyptian Building, where Anarcha was enduring further surgical experiments.

That begins to answer the question of ownership of Anarcha passed from Nathan Harris — as we described in a previous essay— to William L. Maury, the name on the case record in New York City.

The case record indicates that Anarcha was experimented on Richmond, and that she was owned by a Maury.

The Egyptian Building medical school was eventually folded into Virginia Commonwealth University, VCU. And this home is now the VCU alumni house. Anarcha was experimented on two blocks in that direction, and members of the Maury family were coming and going right from this house.

In our next essay, we’ll offer a little more detail on how, and why, that transfer of ownership took place.