This problem persists today in contemporary medical settings, in the form of discrimination against Black patients when it comes to rating and medicating pain; in Sims’s time, it is entirely possible that his willingness to perform experimental surgery on enslaved women—repeatedly, without anesthesia, and with nothing but opium to help them manage the pain as they convalesced—stemmed from the predominant wisdom of the time that they wouldn’t really feel it, not like a white woman would.
