CHAPTER THIRTEEN — THE TRAGEDY AT NORWALK

[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 this essay, we’ll dig into the question of how Anarcha moved from Alabama to Richmond, and then to New York City.

In our last essay, I revealed how and why I became convinced that the Anarcha who appeared in the case register of Woman’s Hospital in New York City was the same as the Anarcha we’ve seen in documents from Alabama.

The question now is how, and when, did Anarcha leave Alabama?

In 1853, there was a terrible train wreck in Norwalk, Connecticut. A train missed a signal that a bridge over a draw — a drawbridge — was still raised. The train went sailing into the gap, and more than fifty people died. At the time, it was one of the worst train wrecks in the history of country.

In 1853, there was a terrible train wreck in Norwalk, Connecticut. A train missed a signal that a bridge over a draw — a drawbridge — was still raised. The train went sailing into the gap, and more than fifty people died. At the time, it was one of the worst train wrecks in the history of country.

Now, in earlier essays, we documented how Betsey’s original owner was a man named Nathan Harris. And the documents suggest that partway through the Alabama fistula experiments, Nathan Harris became the enslaver of all the women who part of the earliest experiments of J. Marion Sims.

And now — get this — Nathan Harris was on the train that went sailing into the draw in Norwalk, Connecticut.

The Norwalk wreck received extensive press all across the country. And the story of how Nathan Harris, of Montgomery, was rescued, was one of the more colorful episodes from the news coverage. And he wasn’t alone. Nathan Harris was traveling with several members of his family, including three children, and a “nurse.”

As we saw in earlier essays, Anarcha had worked as a nurse as a young girl, she had worked as a nurse during the fistula experiences, and, according to Sims’s own account, she, Betsey, Lucy, and the others became nurses for the experiments as well.

Nathan Harris would have most certainly known this. It makes perfect sense that he would have brought her along, as an experienced nurse, on the Harris family journey to the North.

So that’s possibility one. Possibility two takes us back to J. Marion Sims.

This is Thomas Addis Emmet. Not long after Sims moved to New York in 1853 — in fact, he barely missed being on the train that crashed in the Norwalk River — he set about starting his own hospital, known as Woman’s Hospital, which opened in 1855. After some fits and starts he took Thomas Addis Emmet as his assistant.

Emmet was from Virginia. After studying medicine at UVA, he worked at the Emigrant Refuge Hospital on Ward’s Island, just across the East River from Manhattan. He came to know Sims some time before Woman’s Hospital opened.

Thomas Addis Emmet, like Nathan Bozeman, who we talked about in earlier essays, was Sims’s assistant, but he went on to become one of Sims’s greatest critics. Decades later, they had a terrible feud, and Emmet would more or less always describe Sims as a mentor figure, but some of the worst things ever written about Sims came from Emmet’s pen.

And, probably, Thomas Addis Emmet had a greater claim to being the “father of gynecology” than Sims ever did.

Anyway, the strange thing, when it comes to the story of Anarcha, is that Emmet, who was from Virginia, and was now working in New York, starts turning up as a witness in legal documents in Alabama.

The first clue about what’s going on here comes from Sims himself. He says that he was moved to take on Emmet as an assistant because he had married a woman Sims had known for many years, since his days in Alabama.

Not only that, Thomas Addis Emmet’s signature appears on pages that also include Anarcha.

In an earlier essay, we described how Nathan Harris came to own Sims’s experimental subjects. After 1849, it appears they lived at the home of John Duncan in Autauga County, Alabama. John Duncan had three children: John Duncan, Jr., who was Nathan Harris’s law partner; Margaret Duncan, who became Nathan Harris’s wife; and Catherine Duncan.

On February 14, 1854, Thomas Addis Emmet married Catherine Duncan.

To reiterate, Sims’s assistant in New York City married the sister-in-law of the man who owned Anarcha in 1853.

It’s possible to piece together a little more.

Emmet’s autobiography specifies that he met Catherine Duncan at a water cure in New England, not long after the Norwalk train accident.

So it would seem that Catherine Duncan had traveled North with Nathan Harris in 1853. After the train wreck, she didn’t go home. She went to the water cure, and met the man who would soon become the first assistant to J. Marion Sims.

Emmet’s autobiography specifies that after his wedding — which took place in Nathan Harris’s home — he and his new wife went on a tour of the South on their way back to New York.

It would have been easy for Emmet to take Anarcha to Richmond.

There’s one point to make here. Sims began telling the fanciful story of his “cures” of Anarcha and the others as soon as he arrived in New York. He began pitching a new hospital within months, and soon he became quite well known in the city.

But we also know that Anarcha was not actually cured. After all, she’s going to be experimented on again, very soon, in Richmond, and then in New York.

And it’s right in this time that Emmet travels to Alabama, and gets married in a house where it’s very likely that Anarcha is living. And Emmet would have been able to tell, in an instant, that the young woman who was already being described as Sims’s “first cure” was not actually cured.

What happens next is that Anarcha leaves Alabama for more experiments in Richmond, and Emmet is suddenly chosen to be Sims’s assistant. This was the position that would define his career.

That would seem to explain why Thomas Addis Emmet never revealed that Anarcha had also been treated in New York City.

In our next essay, we’ll investigate what happened to Anarcha in Richmond, Virginia.