What a Woman!
These three women, experimented on by Dr. Marion Sims, are called the "Mothers of Gynecology"
Who are Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey?
White doctors often used this false stereotype to justify their experimentation on enslaved Black women who could not consent.
What is the "Black people have higher pain tolerance" stereotype?
This term was coined to describe the way enslaved women resisted by relying on each other, specifically through the methods of Black midwives.
What is "womb liberation"?
Who is Dr. Marion Sims?
This method, used by enslaved women, was meant to try and avoid being forced to do harder tasks.
What is pretending to be pregnant?
This woman, the first to survive surgery to remove an ovarian cyst, spent her surgery singing hymns.
Who is Jane Todd Crawford?
This method, a then common medical practice that is no longer used, helped lead to the death of Dr. McDowell's fourth patient during her experiment?
What is bleeding a patient?
Black enslaved women and girls asserted power by doing the following:
What is practicing coercive contraceptive methods/terminating pregnancies?
This man mistook an enslaved 9 year-old's tumor as a fetus, and did not acknowledge his mistake until after her death.
Who is J. Haywood Jones?
This statue is located in Montgomery, not far from where Dr. Marion Sims has his own statue.
What is the statue honoring the Mothers of Gynecology/Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey?
This woman, whose story inspired Toni Morrison’s Beloved, killed her own child in 1856 to spare them from being recaptured into slavery.
Who is Margaret Garner?
Who is their slave owner?
What traditional and natural method did enslaved women use to control pregnancy?
What are herbal remedies?
The father of abdominal surgery, he performed multiple ovariotomies on enslaved women, but only his surgery on Jane Todd Crawford is widely remembered.
Who is Dr. Ephraim McDowell?
This team was trained and established by Dr. Marion Sims, but was erased from the articles he published.
What is the surgical team made up of enslaved women?
The number of women that Dr. Francois Marie Prevost experimented on to perfect the C-section.
What is 30?
Black women used the lunar calendar to extend the duration of this.
What is breastfeeding?
He performed multiple experiments on a Black woman, claiming that she would have been cured if she hadn’t been forced into unwanted sexual encounters, despite her lack of bodily autonomy.
Who is John Peter Mettauer?
White slave owners encouraged enslaved women to reproduce, though they did not care to address any of the following risks to infant mortality.
What are the unhealthy and hazardous conditions of pregnancy and childbirth, malnutrition, and over exhaustion?
These four unnamed patients, though not as known as Jane Todd Crawford, also aided the same doctor's discoveries.
Who are Dr. McDowell's enslaved patients?
The lack of use of this drug in medical procedures was due not only to misconceptions about the pain tolerance of Black people, but also due to the undeveloped nature of the field.
What is anesthesia?
These two herbs were used to induce menstruation.
What are sage tea and cotton root?
This French surgeon experimented on enslaved Haitian women to perfect the C-section.
Who is Dr. Francois Marie Prevost?
Enslaved women were often criminalized for these unfortunate cases, even though it was out of their control.
What are stillborn babies/infants dying soon after birth?