Say Anarcha

Starred review from April 3, 2023
Journalist Hallman (B & Me) corrects a huge omission in women’s health history in this innovative and riveting study of Anarcha, an enslaved woman who in the mid-1800s endured as many as 30 unanesthetized experimental surgeries performed by the “father of modern gynecology,” J. Marion Sims. Casting a critical eye on Sims’s statements about Anarcha, including his claim that he “cured” her of obstetric fistula, “a horrific condition that is the result of prolonged obstructed labor,” Hallman recreates Anarcha’s life from plantation and census records, and fills in the substantial gaps by drawing on slave narratives compiled by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s. Mixing speculation and fact, he describes a young Anarcha becoming an assistant to an enslaved woman “who had been purchased for $175 to give medicines and catch babies”; her reappearance, more than a decade after the original surgeries, as a patient at Sims’s hospital in New York City; and her marriage to Lorenzo Jackson, an enslaved man in Virginia. Throughout, Hallman presents Sims as a “craven and conniving” physician who built his reputation by courting the press and touring Europe under the pretext of sharing his surgical knowledge while secretly spying for the Confederacy. Through rigorous and innovative research, Hallman successfully transforms Anarcha from historical object to subject, and shines a light on the contentious rise of medical ethics in the 19th century. It’s a must-read. Illus.

April 1, 2023
An excavation of the lives and legacies of Dr. J. Marion Sims, "the so-called Father of Gynecology," and Anarcha, the enslaved woman upon whom he operated without anesthesia. "Every woman living today owes a debt to Anarcha," writes Hallman, author of In Utopia and The Chess Artist, in the introduction to this dual biography. Beginning in 1845, Sims conducted experimental vaginal surgeries to treat fistulae, without anesthesia, on enslaved women in his backyard "Negro Hospital" near Montgomery, Alabama. "If Sims could contrive a cure for fistula on a slave," the author writes, "gains that could be realized were immeasurable....The women would be willing because they were desperate, and their masters would leap at the chance of salvaging their investment." The women, meanwhile, "said that a painful experiment was like being whipped while giving birth," and the surgeries often resulted in death. Supposedly, Anarcha's fistula was the first one Sims "cured." Later, another doctor recognized that "the girl who was the first cure of an incurable condition had not been cured at all." Still, Sims persevered, fueled largely by what the author identifies as blind ambition. "Sims knew his ambition was too large for Alabama," writes Hallman, who divides the book into two parts. Instead of titles, numbered chapters bear descriptions--e.g., "Foreshortening of the vagina," "Animal laboratory," "An enslaved man, stabbed," "Money problems." Although Sims was long esteemed for pioneering modern gynecology, by 2017, the author writes, his legacy "had become intertwined with broader reevaluations of white supremacy in American history" and "with a long overdue indictment of the causes of racial health disparities." Hallman has drawn from almost 5,000 sources, and he includes a four-page list of "all the formerly enslaved persons whose narratives contributed to the re-creation of Anarcha's story." Further information on his research can be found at AnarchaArchive.com. A staggeringly researched book that serves as an indictment of Sims' hubris and an homage to Anarcha.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from April 15, 2023
Hallman tells the appalling stories of J. Marion Sims, a ruthlessly ambitious physician from South Carolina, and the enslaved woman known as Anarcha, who made possible Sims' acclaim as the alleged "father of modern gynecology" by repeatedly enduring his brutal and reckless experiments. Sims was determined to attain wealth and fame with a cure for the miseries of obstetric fistula, no matter how horribly Anarcha and other enslaved women suffered during his surgeries. Hallman's forthright chronicling of the horrors of slavery and the era's toxic misogyny sets the stage for Sims' monstrous procedures, which won him renown in Europe during the Civil War as he supported the Confederacy. Hallman assiduously tracked down every shred of documentation pertaining to Anarcha, but to fully align her life with Sims', he created what he describes as a "comprehensively researched work of speculative nonfiction." That is, he imagines the details of Anarcha's experiences as an historical novelist would, following her path from plantation to plantation, Richmond, New York, Philadelphia, and back to Alabama as she became a proficient herbalist, midwife, and nurse, as well as a wife and mother, all while she struggled with fistula and the cruelties of slavery. Though Hallman goes overboard in this graphic, exhaustive, tangent-prone expos�, his righteous passion and galvanizing prose are commanding and affecting; the realities he reveals are harrowing, tragic, and grimly relevant.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.