THE ANARCHA ARCHIVE — INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the Anarcha Archive, an essay series deriving from my book, Say Anarcha: A Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women’s Health.
The book is a dual biography about the man who is the so-called “father of gynecology,” J. Marion Sims, but more important it is about the young enslaved woman, Anarcha, who stands at the center of the origin story of modern women’s health. For many years, Anarcha was believed to have been lost — her story couldn’t be told. Say Anarcha is an attempt to center Anarcha’s narrative and excavate her life story.
This essay series will document the sources I discovered and relied on in writing Say Anarcha. It reveals how I first found Anarcha, and how I managed — relying on sources uncovered in archives, probate offices, and private manuscript collections all across the country — to follow her life story all the way from the plantation in Alabama where she was born to the lonely forest in Virginia where she is buried.
I should acknowledge right now that this video series is not a substitute for my book, or for any of the books that have been written about the history of gynecology. I’m assuming, going in, that interested viewers will already have at least some level of knowledge of the story of Anarcha.
In 2015, when I first stumbled across the term “vesico-vaginal fistula,” I had no idea that it was going to become, for me, a career-defining mission. When I looked it up — and if you don’t know what a fistula is, you should look it up too — I pretty quickly came to the story of Anarcha and Sims.
I began research in earnest, and what became clear was that there had not been a concerted effort to find Anarcha or any of the approximately nine other young women who were among the earliest experimental subjects of the Alabama fistula experiments of J. Marion Sims. All there was — the only evidence of Anarcha’s life, or Lucy or Betsey, the two other experimental subjects whose names are known — came from Sims’s himself.
Sims went on to be called the “father of gynecology,” and the Alabama fistula experiments — and his so-called “cure” of Anarcha — was the pivotal moment of his career. Hence, Anarcha — who has since been called the “mother of gynecology” — is the central figure in the creation story of modern women’s health.
I first went looking for Anarcha in 2015. Long story short, I found her. I found evidence of her in plantation inventory documents in Montgomery, Alabama. Work on Say Anarcha began then, but in between — it’s now 2023, a few months before the book will be published — I produced a number of articles about Sims and Anarcha.
In 2017, I wrote about Sims’s Central Park monument for Harper’s Magazine.
I did another piece about Sims’s relationship with medical organizations for the Forum, of the African American Policy Forum.
I wrote about the opening of an important fistula hospital in Uganda to connect the story of the Alabama fistula experiments to the ongoing fistula crisis in Africa.
There were other articles as well — and much more than any other book I’ve written, my work on Anarcha came to have the character of a mission, a life purpose.
And all along, I was working on what would become Say Anarcha, a dual biography that reads a little bit like a novel. It’s not made up! It’s all facts — but I wanted you to feel Anarcha’s story, I wanted you to feel the world she lived in.
There was a lot of research — but I have to say that even though the research was exacting and difficult, it was exciting. The search for Anarcha took me across the country, and most of the time it felt like searching for a lost treasure. And in a way, I was. Anarcha’s story is that valuable.
This essay series is about that search. The results of the search were just the beginning of telling Anarcha’s story, but I hope these essays contain just a little bit of the excitement — the excitement of justice — that I felt as I was uncovering Anarcha’s story.
Thanks for reading.
