Description
Book SynopsisA critically acclaimed reckoning with the birth of women's healthcare that illuminates the sacrifices of a young woman who changed the world only to be forgotten by it-until now.
For more than a century, Dr. J. Marion Sims was hailed as the father of modern gynecology. He founded a hospital in New York City and had a profitable career treating gentry and royalty in Europe, becoming one of the world's first celebrity surgeons. Statues were built in his honor, but he wasn't the hero he had made himself appear to be.
Sims's greatest medical accolade was his so-called cure for obstetric fistula, which did forever alter the path of women's health. But the road to that treatment was several years of experimental surgeries-without anesthesia-on a young enslaved woman known as Anarcha.
One medical text after another hailed Anarcha as the embodiment of the pivotal role that Sims played in the history of surgery. Decades later, a groundswell of women objecting t
