A Medical Hell Recounted by Its Victims

January 29, 2019

(Nature) – In the 1840s, the Alabama physician James Marion Sims conducted infamous experimental gynaecological surgery exclusively on black women, bound to the surgical table by chattel slavery, physical force and opium. The drug did not allay their pain, and some historians think that they became addicted to it. Now, playwright Charly Evon Simpson offers a fictionalized retelling of Sims’s egregious practices in Behind the Sheet.