In the 1840s, James Marion Sims, a white doctor in Montgomery, Alabama, performed painful experiments without anesthesia on Lucy, an enslaved Black woman, while other doctors observed.
Sims was lauded as the “Father of Gynecology” after his experiments on at least seven enslaved Black women and girls in Montgomery between 1845 and 1849 helped him develop a technique to repair a chronic complication of childbirth. Though the potentially life threatening experiments caused excruciating pain, Sims legally needed permission only from the enslaved women’s “owners.”