Dr. J. Marion Sims begins to perform horrific surgical experiments on enslaved people.
Date: 1845
Dr. J. Marion Sims, the so-called "Father of Gynecology," conducts unethical surgical experiments without anesthesia on enslaved Black women with vesicovaginal fistulas (a tear between the bladder and uterus). The women include Anarcha, Lucy, Betsy, and at least nine others, who are operated on incessantly–some as many as 30 times. Eventually, all will die from infections resulting from these experiments.
Harriet Washington, a prominent Black woman writer of the 21st century, will expose these histories in her book, Medical Apartheid: the Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.