CHAPTER SEVEN — THE MYSTERY
[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.]
This essay is about one of the most baffling mysteries in the story of Anarcha and J. Marion Sims — and that means considering the life of Dr. Nathan Bozeman, who worked as Sims assistant in Alabama, and went on to become Sims’s greatest critic.
The mystery is that for 170 years, after Sims claimed to have cured Anarcha, all of the women who were part of his earliest fistula experiments disappeared. They just…vanished.
Sims famously invited many doctors and medical students to observe his initial experiments. Many of those doctors went on to publish articles, and some even spoke about their time knowing Sims, but none of them ever said a word about having met Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, or any of his initial group of experiments subjects. And it gets weirder from there.
This is Dr. Nathan Bozeman. He grew up in Alabama, in Autauga County, just to the north of Montgomery, but he went to medical school in Kentucky. He was an early adopter of the use of chloroform as an anesthetic.
By his own account Bozeman returned to Montgomery in June 1849, to begin to practice medicine. He more or less immediately began to work as Sims’s assistant.
Recall that Sims claimed to have cured Anarcha in May or June of 1849. He said that over the next several weeks he cured the remainder of the women in his care.
So Bozeman arrives in March, and begins to work for Sims. Anarcha is “cured” a couple months later, and the remainder of Sims’s experimental subjects are “cured” in the weeks to come. I’m using scare quotes around cured because we’ll be seeing soon enough that Sims’s cures were not what they said they were — but for right now, I have a different question. If Bozeman arrived in March, and Anarcha was cured in May or June, shouldn’t he have seen her?
He didn’t. Many years later, in 1884 — long after Sims and Bozeman began a lifelong feud that I’ll talk about in a later essay — Bozeman published a full account of the procedure he learned from Sims. It was a takedown, published shortly after Sims died. In it, Bozeman details all of Sims’s cases — including Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey. Bozeman suggests that because they were cured, their fistulae must have been easy cases.
And that’s completely wrong. We know, because Sims’s autobiography — never finished and published posthumously a year after Bozeman’s article — offered extensive details, never before seen, about the condition and treatment of Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey.
Bozeman said these cases had been easy — but they weren’t. He didn’t want to admit it, but he’d never seen Sims’s earliest claims to success. To be clear, if Bozeman had seen Anarcha, he most certainly would have made that explicitly clear.
What Bozeman does provide is the names of a number of other enslaved women that Sims experimented on after 1849. These women, however, were not part of Sims’s initial group of experimental subjects.
What all this means is that the women and the “cure” at the center of the story of the birth of modern women’s health is a complete mystery. What happened to her? Where did Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey go after 1849? That’s the story I’ll tell in our next essay.
