[REDUX] BLACK FEMALE SLAVE VIVISECTION, NON-HUMAN ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION, AND THE FOUNDATION OF WEST

I recorded this video that comes after this writing about 4 years ago, but I still wanted to repost with an update on my thoughts:

**TRIGGER WARNING (Sexual Exploitation)** How morbid is it that Marion Sims is deemed the ‘father of gynecology’? Thank you, but I’ll take one of the plethora of granny midwives as the creator of gynecological health any day. I mean, they still teach this dude in medical schools as if he was not some cruel sick racist man. He ‘advanced’ gynecology via vivisection of enslaved Black women without anesthesia, consent, or conscience. Think about all the violent (yet taught to us as ‘civilized’) white forefathers that became the benchmark of ‘white civility’ when it was well known that they raped, had slaves, lynched, etc. I remember some of my teachers thinking I was causing trouble, during my junior high and high school years, when I would point out that such men were SICK individuals who raped, killed, maimed, etc. Why was I being told Sims was the ‘father of gynecology’? Why was I being told Thomas Jefferson was some great person when he had slaves and did with what he wanted with them, sexually? And you know what? It still happens today. It’s common that when a cisgender man, usually white and famous or quite wealthy, has done some really horrible stuff, he usually is supported and then will be written down in HIS-tory that he was some great person of our generation. Can someone wake me up please!? Anyway, I wrote this a few years ago and just wanted to re-share.

In this video, I speak of how Black female slaves were forced to undergo ‘vivisection’ by Dr. Marion Sims, the ‘father’ of Western gynecology. I also speak of how this fits into colonizing both ‘the other’ (Non-white peoples and nature) and how vivisection on non-human animals today is connected to the interlocking system of oppression and suffering that allowed Dr. Sims to repeatedly cut into black female slave’s vagina’s (without anesthesia, remorse, or regret).

Books for further explorations on these intersections:

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South

Animal Welfare and Anti-Vivisection 1870-1910: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Mission (History of Feminism)

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