"Sims acquired a total of eleven women slaves with vesicovaginal fistula from their masters by promising to lodge, board, and treat them, and he built a spartan wooden building, where he conducted surgical experiments on them for the next four years.
"Sims acquired a total of eleven women slaves with vesicovaginal fistula from their masters by promising to lodge, board, and treat them, and he built a spartan wooden building, where he conducted surgical experiments on them for the next four years. During the Victorian period, layers of dress signaled sexual chastity, and doctors were not in the habit of viewing women's unclothed bodies; not even their professional stature gave them license to gaze at women's genitalia. When Sims undertook his fistula experiments, even the term 'gynecology' was a few years in the future. Instead, 'women's doctors' averted their eyes in a chivalrous fashion as they knelt to tend to the modestly clothed ladies of their class, relying upon their sense of touch beneath voluminous Victorian skirts. However, Sims, working with enslaved blacks, was constrained by no such delicacy. He made the women undress completely, then kneel on hands and knees while he and several phys...
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