That doctor, James Marion Sims, would later be heralded as the founding father of gynecology. He came to his discoveries by acquiring enslaved women in Alabama and conducting savage surgeries that often ended in disfigurement or death. He refused to administer anesthesia, saying vaginal surgery on them was “not painful enough to justify the trouble.” Instead, he administered morphine only after surgery, noting that it “relieves the scalding of the urine,” and, as Washington writes, “weakened the will to resist repeated procedures.”
