Dr J. Marion Sims (1813-1883), a White American surgeon, is widely considered to be the father of American gynaecology. He founded Woman’s Hospital in New York, the first of its kind in the country. He was president of the American Medical Association (AMA). When President Garfield was shot, Sims was telegrammed for his advice. He was doctor to the French royal family.
The marker near his birthplace in South Carolina informs us:
Father of modern gynecology, Dr. Sims was honored by the American and by European governments for his service to suffering women, empress and slave alike.
He made his name by finding a way to repair vesicovaginal fistulas. They are caused by tears between a woman’s vagina and bladder during childbirth. It makes urination continuous, uncontrolled and painful. It meant a life of invalidism.
Parke-Davis, a drug company, commissioned a sanitized painting of him for their History of Medicine in Pictures. It shows him facing a Black slave woman who sits on an examination table. She is clothed and calm. A more historically accurate picture would show her naked, screaming, bleeding, being held down against her will as he experiments on her.
It was not that Sims did not know about anaesthesia. He did. But he only used it on White women. He did not think Blacks felt pain the same way Whites do – despite the bone-chilling shrieks they made during his experiments. He gave them morphine – after the operation to help them recover.
That went on and on for five years in the late 1840s while he experimented on Black slave women (never White women) to find out how to repair vesicovaginal fistulas.
Of his 11 slave subjects, we know the names of only three: Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy. Betsy is the one in the Parke-Davis painting. Anarcha suffered 30 of his operations. She at least benefited from his cure. He left half of his Black subjects to suffer from the condition as he moved on to the greater glory of curing White women.
That pattern – using Black people for practice without their consent while Whites disproportionately benefit – was common. It was how anaesthesia and caesarean sections were tried out and perfected. Thomas Jefferson himself tried out a smallpox vaccine on over 200 slaves before giving it to his White relatives.
It was the times. And it still is the times: It did not stop when Black slaves were freed. It went on till at least the 1990s and therefore probably still goes on today.
While laws and ideas about medical consent have changed greatly since the 1800s, even back then doctors understood that no White person would agree to undergo the kind of things Sims did. Which is the very reason he used slaves. Blacks of the time would have regarded it as medical torture – but as slaves they had no choice.
Even today Black Americans make better medical guinea pigs because the law does not protect them as well as Whites – particularly if they are poor or in prison.
Thanks to King, Bulanik, darqbeauty, mary burrell, Kwamla and S for suggesting this topic.
– Abagond, 2014.
Update (2018): New York has removed the statue of Sims from Central Park as a hate symbol and moved it to his grave in Brooklyn.
Source: Mainly “Medical Apartheid” (2006) by Harriet A. Washington.
See also:
- See “J. Marion Sims painting” in Google Images – the Parke-Davis painting. Pfizer, which now owns the rights to the picture, would not let Harriet Washington use it in her book, “Medical Apartheid”.
- The Tuskegee Experiment
- The hearts of white people: the science
- black people as monkeys
- Solomon Northup – who was a slave in the 1840s
Even reading about this is excruciating. Wow.
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Even now, many whites think black people have a higher tolerance of pain than whites and is still disregarded in many cases of health issues.
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@ Abagond, I remember asking you to write a post on this individual a couple of years ago.
Thank you.
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What a monster.
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[…] See on abagond.wordpress.com […]
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“The notion that black people are human beings is a relatively new discovery in the modern west.” -Dr. Cornel West
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I agree with Brothawolf…this was cringe-inducing.
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This man makes my bile rise. He butchered those women with NO anesthesia. Just thinking about it makes me bury my face in my hands from the horror of it all. To be so dehumanized that a person would do to you what a VET wouldn’t do to an ANIMAL. History has shown time and time again who the animals are.My God……
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This is why in another thread I had called surgical procedures as “violent physical assault”. What makes them criminal or not is the concept of “consent”.
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EVIL
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As a physician, a black one , I am not surprised…not at all …in medical school we meet and trained with those very monsters….and they become even more monsterous after training…seriously ,,,the bigotry is in the very air one breathes……They still believe this crap!! While in med school I heard white classmates say of Rodney King” they should have killed the nigger” Blacks made up less than 10% of the med school class and we blacks were all seen as affirmative action babies taking a spot from a more deserving white person….what a trip that was! Out of a class of 145, they were upset about seven black students being there. Never mind that we had to study harder, work harder and BE harder to just get through.Therefore BE smarter just to survive and get crucified on subjective evaluations from white professors with axes to grind….sad really. When I mentioned Dr Charles Drew in my blood banking lecture, the professor (PhD) disavowed any knowledge of him. I was the only black to raise my hand, to speak and honor him. The other black students cowered in the back of the lecture hall. One of those very black students chided me for being too outspoken. The AMA( American Medical Assn) would not allow any black physicians to join until the 1970’s,. thus the NMA (National Medical Assn) was formed..doesn’t say a lot for a national organization huh? I cringe to think of those bigots treating minority patients today.
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Added to the post:
Thanks to King, Bulanik, darqbeauty, mary burrell, Kwamla and S for suggesting this topic.
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@ Jacque
Sims used the N-word freely – in print.
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@ George Ryder: Comment deleted for using a racial slur.
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In his autobiography, Sims claimed that ALL his patients gave consent and that EVERY patient was eventually cured. No patient or attending physician EVER disputed this. It wasn’t until over a century later that anyone claimed otherwise. The condition is very painful and debilitating so it’s not unreasonable those suffering would volunteer for an experimental procedure. At any rate, your claim that his patients weren’t consenting is unsupported.
As for anesthesia, Dr. Sim’s operations took place from 1845 to 1849. The first public demonstration of modern anesthesia wasn’t until a dentist named William Morton used ether to assist the removal of a tumor at Mass General Hospital October 1846. While Sim’s procedure was experimental so was the use of surgical anesthesia. So much so that many patients died from anesthesia during the time in question. He probably wasn’t confident in his ability to safely administer experimental anesthesia on one end while performing experimental surgery on the other. As for your claim that he didn’t give patients morphine until AFTER surgery, that was standard operating procedure. Even today, morphine is used to dull pain after surgery and not as a general anesthetic during surgery.
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@ Da Jokah
1. His curing all his Black patients was disputed at the time by his assistant, Dr Nathaniel Bozeman.
2. He had no trouble giving White women anaesthesia, not only for this procedure, but even to make it easier for their husbands to have sex with them.
3. And in addition to anaesthesia, he had morphine, which in this case would have presumably been better than nothing.
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@ Da Jokah
4. Consent from a slave? What does that even mean? And if it was so easy to get consent for torture, then why were there no White experimental patients?
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@ George
No. No slurs.
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@ George
The one in New York is still there at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street. Here it is in Google Street View:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.792406,-73.952489,3a,75y,275.31h,95.7t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1smJdWT3yoyuWDzspGW3Ry9Q!2e0?hl=en
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disgusting, like brothawolf said they still view blacks as feeling no pain. The women should have had statues built of them for all they had to endure plus compensation. I know that will never happen, just burns me up thinking of all the black folks that were experimented on without their consent then on top of that they were not and are still not given the recognition they deserve. Henrietta lacks comes to mind how her cells were taken without consent and her family did not know.
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abagond
1) I wasn’t aware Bozeman had made that allegation. If so then one should examine whether there was some professional rivalry or falling out between them. Such things are not uncommon. Regardless, there are degrees of success. An operation may improve (or even worsen) a condition. So results aren’t necessarily evidence of malintent.
2) As you pointed out yourself, he didn’t perform the procedure on white women until later. By that time, anesthesia had become more common.
3) I suppose. But it wasn’t commonly used as general anesthesia for this or any other procedure. So his not using as such wasn’t unusual.
4) That’s a reasonable question. But once again, none of his patients ever claimed they hadn’t consented.
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Me while reading Abagond’s blog [http://sco.lt/9Fo7Hd]
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@ Da Jokah
Sims knew about anaesthesia, probably since the early 1840s. The reason he gave for not using it on blacks is that his procedures were “not painful enough to justify the trouble and risk attending the administration,” and that blacks do not feel pain the same way as whites. His words.
As late as 1971 Australian doctors in Tanzania were saying, “‘They don’t experience pain the same way we do,” as an excuse not to give anaesthesia to black patients writhing in pain.
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With Love Glenn @getgln
LOL
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So this article (I didn’t have the inclination to do independent research like DJ) would seem to indicate that this guy saved at least 6 or 7 of his slave patients from a “life of invalidism” (even if he left “half of them to suffer from [their] condition”). It doesn’t specifically say, but seems reasonable to assume his advances later helped millions of women to similarly recapture their lives. He also worked in a time when anesthesia use was not at all common (even if you argue that it had at least been discovered before it was widely used, the vast majority of surgeries at the time would have been conducted without it) and there was slavery and related attitudes… Anyway, I’m sure these surgeries were horrific, but it would be good to try to think about things in a big picture context, including the slave patients who got their lives back. Still a huge plus for society as a whole, including later black women who could escape lives of invalidism thanks to Sims’ research.
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@ biff
The ends do not justify the means.
So was slavery, at least in terms of the nation’s growth and wealth. So do you support slavery too?
Sims was a strong supporter of slavery. His style of research fit right in with that mindset: that the only purpose of black people is to serve whites.
Why are you making excuses for a monster?
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“abagond
Why are you making excuses for a monster?”
Because both biff and Da Jokah are racist a’holes who would rather see black people suffering or dead rather than alive, thriving, and successful
or they would talk about the black middle class instead of poor blacks, poor people who they have no contact with on this blog or in real life.
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@ abagond, the intention of my comment was to thank you for writing the post, as I remember the subject of it coming up intermittently.
Apart from appreciation, my comment was an observation.
It not intended to “tell” you anything — there was no “sarcasm” implied in it.
I’m afraid you often misunderstand many, many of my comments in this way.
May I also add that:
Nom de Plume (Pay it Forward) suggested this subject for a post in 2012.
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Interesting post. There have been quite a few instances of medical experimentation without consent and it might have happened more often that we know. The Tuskeegee syphillis experiments are pretty well known. Probably less known is the Guatemala experiments in the 1940s.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/guatemala-syphilis-experiments-in-1940s-called-chillingly-egregious/
“What would you call deliberately infecting people with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases? If you were among a group of American medical researchers working in Guatemala in the 1940s, you would have called it science.”
There have also been various experiments involving irradiating individuals without consent:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_experimentation_in_the_United_States#Experiments_involving_other_radioactive_materials
“In the 1950s, researchers at the Medical College of Virginia performed experiments on severe burn victims, most of them poor and black, without their knowledge or consent, with funding from the Army and in collaboration with the AEC. In the experiments, the subjects were exposed to additional burning, experimental antibiotic treatment, and injections of radioactive isotopes. The amount of radioactive phosphorus-32 injected into some of the patients, 500 microcuries (19 MBq), was 50 times the “acceptable” dose for a healthy individual; for people with severe burns, this likely led to significantly increased death rates”
http://news.yahoo.com/secret-cold-war-tests-st-louis-raise-concerns-214608828.html
“Doris Spates was a baby when her father died inexplicably in 1955. She has watched four siblings die of cancer, and she survived cervical cancer.
After learning that the Army conducted secret chemical testing in her impoverished St. Louis neighborhood at the height of the Cold War, she wonders if her own government is to blame.
In the mid-1950s, and again a decade later, the Army used motorized blowers atop a low-income housing high-rise, at schools and from the backs of station wagons to send a potentially dangerous compound into the already-hazy air in predominantly black areas of St. Louis.
Local officials were told at the time that the government was testing a smoke screen that could shield St. Louis from aerial observation in case the Russians attacked.
But in 1994, the government said the tests were part of a biological weapons program and St. Louis was chosen because it bore some resemblance to Russian cities that the U.S. might attack. The material being sprayed was zinc cadmium sulfide, a fine fluorescent powder.”
I wonder what else we don’t know about or don’t currently acknowledge as medical experimentation?
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@ Abagond: Thanks for the acknowledgement. Thanks for posting about this beast.
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Sims is credited with the following in medical taxonomy:
Sims anoscope
Sims cannula
Sims curette
Sims dilator
Sims double-ended retractor
Sims double-ended speculum
Sims knife
Sims needle
Sims plug
Sims position – facilitates vaginal examination.
Sims probe
Sims proctoscope
Sims retractor
Sims scissors
Sims sound
Sims speculum
Sims suction tip
Sims suture
Sims tenaculum
Sims uterine sound – a slender flexible sound.
Sims vaginal decompressor
Sims vaginal speculum
The speculum he invented: http://www.surgical123.com/simsvaginal/speculums.aspx
http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Sims+position
Specula (devices used to keep a bodily orifice open) have been used for for medical purpose for millenia, but other than that, they have been used to inflict violence, or as torture devices. They were known to be used to force feed Africans on slave ships.
One way enslaved Africans could resist their circumstances was by refusing to eat. Danish slavers were known to have a method to deal with such slaves on their ships: they would use the speculum oris (originally used for dental procedures) to force open the mouths of such slaves, and food forced down their throats, causing gagging and vomiting. The procedure would be repeated, followed by more gagging and eventual bleeding, over and over (“The Slave Ship Fredensborg” by Leif Svalesen). This particular ship, the Fredensborg, transported slaves and sailors from Denmark and Norway to the Gold Coast (Ghana), St. Thomas and St. Croix.
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@ Bulanik,
Thanks for posting the above information. It’s so disheartening learning about some of the inhumane ways slaves were treated. The fact that slavers could conscientiously act so cruel is mindboggling.
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http://www.examiner.com/article/lawsuit-obama-s-epa-conducted-nazi-like-experiments-on-human-subjects
June 24, 2013
“The lawsuit describes the experiment as involving 41 human subjects, that were elderly patients with a variety of medical issues including asthma and heart problem{s}, being paid $12 per hour to participate in the experiment two hours at a time. During those hours, they were breathing through a plastic tube, a mixture of air and diesel exhaust, the latter of which was piped in directly from the tail-pipe of a running truck parked just outside the building.”
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abagond “Sims knew about anaesthesia, probably since the early 1840s.”
He probably didn’t know about it when he started his procedures. The first public demonstration wasn’t until late 1846.
The reason he gave for not using it on blacks is that his procedures were “not painful enough to justify the trouble and risk attending the administration,” and that blacks do not feel pain the same way as whites. His words.
Yes. And that’s a very good reason not to use it. There were a number of highly publicised fatalities from anesthesia during this time. So much so that many patients opted not to use it. If Sims wasn’t trained or confident in it’s use he may have very well thought it not worth the risk. If he believed blacks were less susceptible to pain then that’s even more reason not to subject them to those risks.
I notice you stress that he wasn’t using anesthesia on blacks. What you fail to mention is that he wasn’t using it on ANYONE during the time these surgeries were taking place. He didn’t start using it until later.
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I would say whether the ends justify the means is something that differs on a case by case basis. Often, the reason they might not is because you aren’t looking at a big enough picture. For instance, slavery provided temporary economic benefic, but was terrible in the long run, leading to national division and civil war.
Anyway, we’re not talking about nazi experiments here to test pain thresholds before death. He didn’t try to murder people (and you don’t mention anyone dying from the operations). He tried to help people with a condition causing them to be invalids (as you described), which apparently ruined their lives, and you’ve indicated that at least half of these women were cured. For all we know, he determined that anesthesia of the time could be more likely to lead to death (even if white women would demand it). I don’t know exactly how painful the operation would be, but some of the region in question might be insensate (this is the reason some hemorrhoid related surgery is done without anethestia).
Anyway, you are calling him a “monster”, but the facts you cite don’t necessarily support that, other than saying that he thought blacks didn’t feel pain the same way as whites did (which now seems stupid to us). It’s clear the people of the time thought he was a hero (hence the statuary). Would the affected black women really be better simply living as “invalids” with no likely cure to their ailment? I’m just saying, is this the best post you can do in terms of showing how terrible white people are?
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biff
Whether or not the end justifies the means is a matter of opinion and not a matter of fact based on situation as you seem to indicate.
Furthermore the post was not meant to point out the horrors of white people but the horrors of J. Marion Sims. That is unless they are one in the same and please don’t try to argue what abagond meant.
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biff, Jokah you seriously need to check your moral deficiencies in your screwed up defenses for this man. All I’m hearing from the both of you ranges from “he probably didn’t know about anaesthesia” to “he didn’t try to murder people”. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, keep telling yourselves that despite his torturous practices against a group of people you look down upon, he was still a great innovator. Seriously, re-read what you’ve typed. There is a serious lack of constructive moral judgment in both your statements.
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@ biff
1. The women he experimented on had to be held down as they shrieked in pain. It was so terrible that his White male assistants quit. He had to use slaves to hold down the women instead. That is how gruesome it was.
2. As bad as this condition was, I doubt any woman would willingly undergo five years of torture for a possible cure. That none of his experimental subjects were free women indicates that.
3. Except maybe in a moment of weakness, no one with any decency would want 11 innocent people tortured to find a cure for their own condition.
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“So was slavery, at least in terms of the nation’s growth and wealth. So do you support slavery too?”
No, it wasn’t, and I am surprised you use this slave apologist argument. Slavery was abandonded in the rest of the world because it made no economic sense. Same in the US. The ones who benefitted from it were the very rich, nobody and nothing else. Slaves don’t consume because they don’t have money, and thus don’t contribute to economic growth. This leads to economic stagnation. The south would have developed much faster economically without slavery. Consumption drives capitalism. Slavery slows it down.
This is really the basics of racism: the ones at the very top benefit, and maintain the system by fooling the ones below (IE, poor whites), that they would have it much better if [insert race/nationality/ethnicity] was relegated to the bottom.
And the difference between J. Marion Sims and Josef Mengele is that Sims’ experiments actually benefitted humanity in the end.
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@ naishee
Actually, slavery is NOT abandon in the rest of the world at all, and never has been. There are still many organizations worldwide fighting slavery wherever they find it. Slavery itself is a very old institution that has been around for many thousands of years.
If it had no material benefit to societies , I’m sure that fact would have been discovered much earlier than the American slave trade. I don’t think that your logic is sound.
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@ bygodslove
Thank you.
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Big Picture? I am amazed that “the context” mentioned ^^ included giving mere slaves something like QUALITY OF LIFE.
If Sims cared about the people he was trying to “help” he would done something about the condition that had put them in that condition in the first place.
I feel some folks didn’t get memo about “What Slavery Was”, and also, seem to know little about Nazi medicine they compare Sims’ violations to.
I also wonder why the atrocities against enslaved Africans is somehow “less” than those perpetrated on European Jews? That latter was “worse”?
Note too, that because of breakthroughs of Nazi gynaecology, Nazi sadism brought about useful advances, too, such as hormonal preparations like oestradiol valerate (Progynova) and hydroxyprogesterone hexanoate (Proluton). Wonderful news for the pharmaceutical industry!
http://www.defence.gov.au/health/infocentre/journals/adfhj_apr06/adfhealth_7_1_33-37.html
The condition Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy (and many more) suffered from was caused by obstructed labour, and/or violent rape.
Both those occurrences were hardly unusual among females SLAVES.
These were slaves, after all — breeders and labour units, not persons and not human beings with delicate feelings or human rights and such.
Similarly, their babies — enslaved babies — were probably most prone to neonatal tetanus (lock-jaw), in this case, a condition caused by a bacteria in farm soils … because slave quarters were often close to stables, etc.
Sims was a plantation physician (perhaps like a fancy-ass vet) and he had a theory that if he “moved around” the soft skull-bones of these infants’ during their birth, they wouldn’t contract tetanus.
He carried out this appalling procedure with a shoemaker’s awl, basically a stilleto used for puncturing leather :
https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQLl5ixxw5Vh6fd_lqCium1Rbczup8uyIp4sghYz4Llz6mQIDrU
It seems unlikely that these children would have been born alive after being punctured in their skulls whilst still in the womb.
However, this was not a technique he used on non-slaves; these infants had no rights. He owned their tiny bodies, using them for autopsies after the were born dead.
But, back to the medical condition that Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy suffered from. Pregnant women are supposed to receive especially nutritious diets and refrain from heavy labour. Slaves had no such luxury. Pregnancies marked by malnutrition and back-breaking work do not culminate in quick and easy deliveries.
Bear in mind, too, that Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy may have had been born nutrient-deficient babies themselves, and experienced subsequent malnourishment during childhood, too, so may have been disadvantaged even before impregnation.
(It’s known now that most African-Americans are lactose intolerance, and if the main source of calcium for these slaves was through dairy products — and meagre and limited slave-diet — these girls and women may not have only been unable to absorb calcium, but could have also suffered from poorly developed pelvic bones, which leads to long and difficult childbirth as well.
http://www.fda.gov/forconsumers/consumerupdates/ucm094550.htm)
Because we don’t know the narratives of these slaves, we don’t know their specifics. It’s not unlikely that some had been forced into child-bearing, impregnated through rape, whilst still only girls. Giving birth is still dangerous — if not fatal — for adolescent girls giving birth in the poorest circumstances.
Sorry to go into the horrorifying details.
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comment in moderation.
typos: *horrifying
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@ Bulanik:
May I also add that:Nom de Plume (Pay it Forward) suggested this subject for a post in 2012.
***
Thank you.
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@ Bulanik
Right: the condition was more common among slave women due to malnutrition and early pregnancies.
Sims tended to blame the poor health of slaves on their ignorance and supposed laziness rather than poor diet and living conditions.
The reason he was prying open the skulls of black babies as an attempt to cure tetany is because of the common belief among whites that blacks were made less intelligent by their skulls closing earlier.
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@ naishee
In my experience that is a present-day argument used by White Americans. I suspect they like the it because it means they do not benefit from past injustice. It gets them off the hook.
Slavery was a huge waste of human capital, a legacy the US still suffers from, so it was bad economics in that sense. But the idea that no one made money from it goes against common sense and the historical record. Most of the richest men in America were slave owners. If slavery could not pay the bills, it would have gone broke in short order. Instead, in the US it went on for hundreds of years and was ended only by war.
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Bulanik
Your summary brings to mind a one Delphine LaLaurie. A sick woman who murdered and tortured her slaves.
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Delphine LaLaurie would have been another monster to post about.
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@King,
Indeed, slavery is very much alive and well today. There are more slaves alive today than there has ever been in world history, even compared with the 19th century slavery systems operating in the New World and European colonies. There was more involuntary human trafficking and forced involuntary labour in 2013 than there was in the entire 300 years of the Middle passage.
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“If it had no material benefit to societies , I’m sure that fact would have been discovered much earlier than the American slave trade. I don’t think that your logic is sound.”
“But the idea that no one made money from it goes against common sense and the historical record.”
As I said, it benefitted the rich (= slave-owners, often). It hurt the poor especially, and the middle class. And slowed down economic development. The benefits of slavery are all short-term, hence why it was/is popular.
Slavery being popular today doesn’t really disprove that. The west benefits from it, but the countries where it is commonly practiced doesn’t, really. The North was richer than the South, in part because it could benefit from the south’s slavery.
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I suppose this is another example of ignorance that happened many years ago that closet racists like yourself use to give yourself a foundation for your hatred?
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And yet, Gaylord, you love this blog enough to visit. So, what does that make you?
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Sorry, that simply is not true for 2 reasons:
– it does indeed benefit the areas outside the West, at least certain individuals, organizations, both private and government
– Slavery is still widely practiced in the West, including right in the USA, benefiting people exactly where it is being practiced.
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^ There was a recent American film about cops running a (sex?) slave operation. I wanted to see it but I think the distribution was kept low, I never saw it in theaters. I have yet to track down a copy. An Asian American female was the protagonist.
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@ Gaylord
1. Not “ignorance” but racism. It is the only thing that can account for the utter inhumanity of Sims’s experiments, particularly since he did not do them on Whites.
2. While his experiments “happened many years ago”, Blacks continue to be unwilling guinea pigs for medical research down to present times.
3. I am not a closet racist:
4. Show me where I expressed hatred for Whites. Not anger at their deeds, at their racism, but hatred for them as people.
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Why is that every time the racism of whites is exposed people like Gaylord take that as an offense and turn the tables on you, calling you the racist? I always wonder that. Pointing out racism is not the same as racist hatred in anyway. Just because you can’t deal with the historical and/or present day facts is YOUR problem. But you’re too busy trying to defend yourself against racist deeds for which you may not even be responsible that you can’t listen – but most importantly that you don’t do anything to change your behavior or call others out on their own.
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Well, Bulanik, you’ve added some info that wasn’t in the original article. That’s helpful, and certainly builds on the case for calling this man a “monster” somewhat. The whole sticking awls into women’s wombs is pretty disturbing, even if Mr. Sims actually believed he might be helping the unborn to avoid getting a terrible disease by doing this. However, you and Abagond should be careful about calling the unborn “babies” or “children” as above, because while they are in the womb they are subhuman fetuses worth nothing–or at least this is the Narrative and why it would be racist and sexist to concern oneself about the 50%+ of black fetuses who are now aborted each year in the U.S.
Instead, it is much more productive to focus on white historical cruelty. Slavery was definitely pretty horrific, as Bulanik’s discussion clearly illustrates. It would be wrong to compare this to conditions that existed in Africa at the time, because that would be racist. Instead, the proper metric is to show how much worse these ladies had it than upper class white women in America at the time.
Hundreds of years in the future, whites will still be atoning for the sins of their ancestors, because it is just something that doesn’t go away. It doesn’t even matter that none of my personal ancestors were involved in this or that the ones in the U.S. at the time were adamantly anti-slavery and were sometimes persecuted because of it (according to my great grandfather’s memoirs), because to be white is to be guilty of all, just as all (or at least most) blacks regularly dutifully acknowledge and accept personal blame for atrocities committed by blacks they are not directly related to.
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@ biff
” because to be white is to be guilty of all, just as all”—-Yet this is simply a common conclusion that you come to. Oh well
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biff,
The sins white people have committed in the past and present, truly won’t go away. But if white people in the future are like white people of today and yesterday, they will likely try to ignore it, downplay it or pass the blame, anything to accept any hint of accountability for themselves. In doing so, they will help maintain whiteness if white supremacy exists in the future. Being a pessimist, it will likely still be there lurking depending on how far in the future it is.
When you said that, “…To be white is to be guilty of all”, it sounds a lot like what we as the ‘other’ go through whenever something bad happens. We get that cringe and say to ourselves, “Please don’t let it be one of us.” If that is the case, congratulations. You’ve just gotten a taste of what it’s like to be the ‘other’. Why do we go through that? Because we’re still paranoid of white revenge. The system of white supremacy has made it so populations of people of color are punished for the actions of a few somehow, someway.
Imagine going through that emotion everyday or every other day when you watch the news, read a newspaper or look at reality TV.
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That is why we have to work hard to revise the history books.
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“biff
Instead, it is much more productive to focus on white historical cruelty. Slavery was definitely pretty horrific, as Bulanik’s discussion clearly illustrates. It would be wrong to compare this to conditions that existed in Africa at the time, because that would be racist.”
Linda says,
No, it wouldn’t be “racist”, Biff… it would be foolish and historically incorrect to compare illness that affected Americans to Africans during that time period… at that time, Africans had better bill of health and longer life span than white people.
The black slaves in America were being affected by the life they led in America (violent, multiple and mass forced rapes was probably not a problem that the average African woman had to deal with back in Africa since their culture believed in the sanctity of girls being virgins and in marriage)
The doctors or medicine men from small African villages to larger cities were better doctors than any white doctor in Europe or in the Americas.
In the Caribbean, the Europeans themselves used the African slave “medicine men” when they were sick because they had a better chance to survive. White doctors of this era were still using leeches to “bleed” the bad humours out of the body.
“Through the use of herbs and medicine, the Obeah man, was able to “miraculously” cure or poison (obeah) a person to death. Considering the development and practices (bloodletting) of “modern” European medicine at the time, an ill person had a much greater chance of survival by seeking out an Obeah man rather than a white physician.”
http://scholar.library.miami.edu/slaves/Religion/religion.html
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–continued
That is the reason why European scientists and settlers, studied and learned from the Africans, Asians, Indians (from India), Middle East and Native Americas about these people’s indigenous herbs and plants (you know, the ones that did not grow in Europe and that’s why Europeans died like flies)
and in time, they learned how to synthesize the active ingredients in laboratories and copied procedures already performed in these so-called “primitive” societies.
Here’s a list of non-white medicines and procedures that your white ancestors “appropriated” and learned how to use from Africans and others,
so that one day your American text books could lie to you and tell you that these drugs were “discovered” by white people
quinine / cinchona ( aka ghina, or quina-quina by the Peruvian NA)
“ It was the South American Indians who were the first to use the bark of the cinchona tree as a cure for Malaria. The Indians even used the drug as a muscle relaxant to cure uncontrollable shivers due to the low temperatures.
Until the appearance of cinchona in Europe during the mid 17th century medical practitioners treated victims of fevers, and malaria in particular, using primitive methods such as limb amputation, purging, blood-letting, the administration of herbs, rest, massage, hydrotherapy and a controlled diet. More unconventional methods included the wearing of amulets, the application of split pickled herrings to the feet, placing the fourth book of the Iliad under a patient’s head, throwing a patient head first into a bush in the hope he would get out quickly enough to leave his fever behind and “the embrace of a bald-headed Brahmin widow at dawn” (Poser and Bruyn).”
http://humantouchofchemistry.com/quinine-a-miracle-against-malaria.htm
The Africans already had their own cures for Malaria which they did not share with the white men. It was the Native Peruvians who did that.
small pox vaccines
“ Traditions have influenced each other, competed, and shared techniques, knowledge and practice. By the early 1700s smallpox inoculation was practised across parts of Africa, India and the Ottoman Empire. It spread from the Ottoman Empire to Europe, and from Africa to the Americas with enslaved Africans. The works of Hippocrates, composed in ancient Greece, were translated into Arabic by authors such as Ibn Sina, and became the foundation of Unani Tibb. They were rediscovered in Europe in their Arabic translations during the Renaissance and became central to biomedicine.”
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/themes/traditions.aspx
and I guess, in a twisted sort of way, it could be said that white people did discover something new — they discovered that non-white people had better medicine and doctors than they did!
it was an African slave who taught Cotton Mather in 1706, a white man of Boston, about African inoculation methods for smallpox but this “discovery” in all the western history books is credit to Edward Jenner, who developed his smallpox vaccine in 1798 —
instead of the history just saying they‘figured it out from the Africans,’ they make up some story that he “discovered” it by observing milkmaids… well they must of been African milkmaids because this is how the white South African Boers learned about it.
how can someone discover something that already exists!
So, sorry Biff, the Africans were not on the same “plane of ignorant” as Europeans were back in those times when it came to medicine. Everyone had their own traditions and medicines but back then, Europeans were the one’s who were behind.
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Biff, this is not about your feelings.
This is not even an appropriate subject for your thought-experiment.
As much as you wish to distance yourself from what this subject makes you feel what you don’t want to feel — all that won’t go away just by switching things around in your head, extrapolating into the Sci-Fi of the future — and pronouncing what the narrative is, or should be, about. Rubbish, total rubbish.
This means the following is irrelevant:
— contemporary rates of abortion among various ethnic groups in the US, — —–19th Century midwifery practices in the African continent;
— the moral culpability of those who have not been born yet
Utterly irrelevant.
We aren’t doing cultural comparisons or separating the goats from the sheep. This is about what Sims did and the glory he reaped for his atrocities.
************
From what I have been told about Sims’ practices, he punctured the babies skulls just prior to their birth, because he believed that tetanus was caused by movement of the skull bones during birth. He did not kill the about-to-born children of white people on the strength of this belief….have you figured out WHY yet?
So, we are talking about full-term babies who could breath for themselves if their brains hadn’t been stabbed deeply moments before with a long spike!
Whether the viability of these enslaved infants’ personhood — the “abortion argument” — had begun at conception, implantation, quickening, or whatever — is simply immaterial, as well as deflection of the most distasteful and transparent kind.
YOU have the privilege of entertaining the most repugnant of theories.
Moreover, when Sims punctured the skulls of the unborn –he wasn’t doing it because the mother — a slave with no human rights — had elected to have an abortion.
Do you actually believe she had a choice? That she, a mere slave, had, like:
* maternity leave or
*Pre K facilities down on the plantation? Huh?
Slaves were no more than cattle. They did not own themselves, let alone have rights to bodily integrity…understand?
What is more, Sims wasn’t even trying to induce a miscarriage, was he. Maybe you missed that.
**************
His intention wasn’t pregnancy termination. He violated and murdered a population he considered inferior and debased. Which brings me onto your use of the word “sub human”. Did that just slip out or what?
How come the unborn of enslaved Africans “sub human”? Accident?
The babies had tetanus, a deadly infection in the newborn. An infection does not render the human host “sub human” when it is contracted.
In Biology-terms, I have heard the the unborn of human beings called “parasites”, because they feed on the nutrients of another body.
However I have only heard “sub human” being jused in discussions about among PRIMATES ONLY. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC302198/)
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A side note to Linda’s remarks:
Sims was enabled by more than white supremacy or being a white man born into a society founded on the enslavement of Africans. Sims was an indivdual who enabled to build his reputation and start a medical tradtition because he was privileged to do so at a time when anyone practicing midwifery and healing was demonized.
Wise Women, herbalists, practitioners of natural medicine were excluded and had been actively persecuted — and executed as WITCHES — for their knowledge and abilities. The greatest part of their knowledge and skill was destroyed with them. It was witches who developed an extensive understanding of bones and muscles, herbs and drugs, while physicians were still deriving their prognoses from astrology and alchemists were trying to turn lead into gold. *
Sim’s lifework was one of the foundations of what is, today, the political and economic monopolization of medicine. Before that, the healing hearts and physical care of families were the responsibility of older women (in the main).
Sims and his ilk were in direct opposition to that, and sought for themselves to be the sole practitioners of a more “scientific” tupe of Medicine.
It’s documented that the *male “barber-surgeons” discredited, persecuted, and often killed the wisewomen healers.*
*http://www.amazon.com/Witches-Midwives-Nurses-Contemporary-Classics/dp/1558616616
After slavery, any black person who wished to practice medicine would not be permitted to do so. Not only only were they excluded from medical schools, if any such schools were opened they would be forced to close! This is was so, because the Flexner Report enforced it. The Report was a 1910 instrument financed by the Carnegie Corporation, and was used to “standardize” medical practice in the US and Canada. The Flexnor Report classed ALL education of blacks (and white women) to be sub-standard compared to white men.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report
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My bad, jefe. I made a mistake in the sentence you copied and pasted. It should say, “But if white people in the future are like white people of today and yesterday, they will likely try to ignore it, downplay it or pass the blame, anything to exempt any hint of accountability for themselves.”
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Legion, you’re probably thinking about “The Abduction of Eden” or “Eden”. As sick as it made me feel at points, it was really well done.
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Yes Gen, thank you. That’s it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1734433/
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“Abagond should be careful about calling the unborn “babies” or “children” as above, because while they are in the womb they are subhuman fetuses worth nothing–or at least this is the Narrative and why it would be racist and sexist to concern oneself about the 50%+ of black fetuses who are now aborted each year in the U.S.”
_ _ _
The fetus of a human is a human fetus.
Regarding the number of abortions according to race, abortion statistics are based on reports to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), a federal agency, and to the Guttmacher Institute, a private agency. One can only guess at the number of abortions, as well as the race of the women who receive this service, which are left unreported, and especially with regards to some private care offices and clinics which don’t bother at all to to fill out and return the surveys / questionnaires sent them by the Guttmacher Institute regarding the number of abortions performed in (the privacy of) the phycian’s office.
As to federal reporting, as of 2010 (the last reporting year availabe) Maryland, New Hampsire and the state of California, which is said to have more abortions procedures performed than any other state in the union, have not reported to the CDC the number of each state’s abortion procedures. For California, their failing to report has gone on for many years.
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Pay it Forward:
There actually are some reported statistics out there. Please see, e.g., http://newsone.com/2919457/dept-of-health-nyc-black-women-abortions/
Data from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene reveals that NYC black women had more abortions than live births in 2012, 24,758 live births vs. 31,328 for a kill ratio of over 55%. I would imagine that unreported abortions would also be more common than unreported births (PIF’s comment makes sense re: abortion non-reporting). Even if you assume percentage abortion rates in NYC are a bit higher than average, it’s still very likely 50% plus nationally for black fetuses.
Bulanik:
it’s absolutely not about my feelings. It’s about facts and which ones we choose to focus on. Planned Parenthood has advocated that babies born alive during an abortion attempt should be killed by the attending physician if this is what the woman wants. The argument is that these little individuals are not fully humans worthy of legal protection until they are born with the consent of the mother. Therefore, they are legally “subhuman”, regardless of race (not a racial categorization). Therefore, it was inappropriate for you to refer to these fetuses as “babies”, as you did again in your most recent post (which is offensive). If they were really “babies”, then what is occurring among the current black community and (mostly white) facilitators is straight up genocide, and the actions of Sims would pale in comparison and we shouldn’t even be wasting our time bringing up this sort of thing. Instead, we must conclude that both these abortions and Mr. Sims activities were conducted on subhumans, so not really all that meaningful.
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@ Biff
That should not be too surprising, given the original (and probably current) goals of the human population control cabal.
http://www.blackgenocide.org/sanger.html
“Margaret Sanger’s writings echoed ideas about inferiority and loose morals of particular races that were widespread in the contemporary United States. In one “What Every Girl Should Know” commentary, she observed that Aboriginal Australians were “just a step higher than the chimpanzee” with “little sexual control,” as compared to the “normal man and Woman.”
Wiki
Sanger’s “Negro Project:”
http://www.nationalblackprolifeunion.com/Margaret-Sanger-and-The-Negro-Project.html
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it was an African slave who taught Cotton Mather in 1706, a white man of Boston, about African inoculation methods for smallpox but this “discovery” in all the western history books is credit to Edward Jenner, who developed his smallpox vaccine in 1798 —
how can someone discover something that already exists!
The procedure you’re talking about is variolation not vaccination. The terms are frequently used interchangeably but they’re not the same.
Europeans learned of variolation from the same place Africans did — Arabs who, in turn, had learned about it from either India or China. Variolation (ie. inoculation) is NOT however the same as vaccination. Variolation uses live virus cells to infect someone with a less lethal case of the disease that has a fatality rate of 2%. That sounds pretty good compared to the 20% fatality rate of naturally occurring smallpox until one realizes it doesn’t provide lifelong immunity, variolated persons can infect others with smallpox and not everyone catches smallpox in the first place.
So you’re comparing a 2% variolation fatality rate for everyone versus a 20% fatality rate for only those people who catch the disease. More than 10% of the entire population has to catch smallpox just to break even. So it’s a good bet PROVIDED there’s an outbreak. Otherwise, you’re killing 1 in 50 people for nothing.
Vaccination however uses a modified strain of the virus that doesn’t give someone the disease so it can’t be spread to others. It also has a fatality rate of only 1 in a million.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation#Transition_into_vaccination
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Da Jokah,
if you put a pig in a dress, do you know what you have? a pig
The Africans had immunity to smallpox because of their methods of inoculation, which they formulated themselves and taught the ARABS (you got it the other way around son) and the Europeans had NO immunity because they had no procedure for inoculation.
Doesn’t matter what the Europeans developed latter, without the Africans, they had nothing to go on… tomato vs tomatoe
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Margaret Singer another racist monster. Should have done a post on her too.
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“The Africans had immunity to smallpox because of their methods of inoculation, which they formulated themselves and taught the ARABS (you got it the other way around son)”
Everything I’ve read said Arabs had variolation first and spread the technique to Africa. Do you have any evidence to suggest it was the other way around mom?
“Doesn’t matter what the Europeans developed latter, without the Africans, they had nothing to go on… tomato vs tomatoe”
Variolation played no role in Jenner developing the smallpox vaccine. It was based on the observations of local farmers that anyone who got cowpox had immunity from smallpox.
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biff
I am sure you are aware that using one states abortion stats does not give you a 50% average nationally?
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@ Da Jokah
Do you? Because based on what I read of your Wikipedia source you don’t.
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A little quote from biffs post.
“As far as pregnancy terminations, black children who were aborted comprised 42.4 percent of the total number of abortions in New York City. In 2012, out of 73,815 abortions in the city, 31,328 black babies were aborted.”
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If they were really “babies”, then what is occurring among the current black community and (mostly white) facilitators is straight up genocide, and the actions of Sims would pale in comparison and we shouldn’t even be wasting our time bringing up this sort of thing. Instead, we must conclude that both these abortions and Mr. Sims activities were conducted on subhumans, so not really all that meaningful.
Biff, where does it say that a fetus is considered subhuman or not ‘human’ enough to be considered (for lack of a better word) significant as far as abortion goes?
Furthermore, considering that abortions of any kind is meaningless is one’s opinion.
Lastly, the actions of Sims is still relevant to the conversation in regards to the gynecology of black women. Again, you thinking that it’s not as big a deal is strictly your opinion, albeit a warped one.
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sharina “Do you? Because based on what I read of your Wikipedia source you don’t.”
Everything I’ve read said it was. Including the wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation#Sudan
Two more sources saying the same thing.
Bioinformatics for Vaccinology, page 6.
Variolation in India and Southwestern Asia, page 253.
There’s no concrete proof. But the circumstantial evidence overwhelmingly supports an east to west spread of the variolation technique. Which is why mainstream scholarly publications say it. Now, since the original claim says the opposite I’d appreciate it someone could provide just one current mainstream source to support it.
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@Da Jokah
Things that old I would not expect it to be concrete proof, so no need to explain.
“Now, since the original claim says the opposite I’d appreciate it someone could provide just one current mainstream source to support it.”—Actually to dispute it one just needs to provide a source. Not one that is “mainstream.” In making this request you are attempting to eliminate a viable source so as to stake claim in your favor. I will let you know what I find when and if I find it, but I am sure if Linda made the claim then she has a source.
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@ Biff said:
I see: derailment, deflection and distraction. 😀
Obviously the subject is the ‘real’ genocide is abortion in present day USA!
For a moment there, I though Biff was even going to say US abortion in 2014 was the ‘real’ black Holocaust…
So, now, Sims and slavery is apparently irrelevant, because this is really about Abortion, or when a person becomes a person? Well, that IS convenient.
Abortion, as we all know is a legal and moral GREY AREA.
Afaik, under contemporary US law the foetus doesn’t have its own “life” until or unless it’s separated from the mother. Therefore, a foetus is not a “human being” because it only becomes one when it is born. But, depending on the jurisdiction, the foetus IS a being if the mother is physically attacked: ie., if the mother mother was killed, the killer may be charged with Double Homicide.
But that is neither here nor there.
Sims, Anarcha, Lucy and Betsy lived in teh 19th century, and only Sims was a legal human.
Biff does not want this subject to be about Sims, slavery or the impact of both because Biff would rather evade those subjects…
Those subjects are a “waste of time”, in his/her opinion. However, the muddy waters of a legal and biological Technicallity is somehow preferred.
Add in some:
— fingerpointing, and conjured-up
— faux “offence” to distance oneself from slavery and what it was…
Okay. I doubt if it will make Biff’s white guilt go away, though.
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***
contd:
These days black people are considered full persons in law.
They weren’t back when Sims was practicing, back in the 19th century, on the plantation.
That is a big, important, detail.
Back then, in the 19th century, the general belief was that abortion, at any time after conception, was the loss of a human life. Sure, the era Sims’ lived in saw the development of microsopes and many strides in northern European scholarship, where there were great and continuous advances in the study of embryology, but, from what we know about Sims, that was not his orientation …down on the plantation. He would graduate to glory from these sordidness of working on black bodies, wouldn’t he?
Whilst Sims was doing what he did, abortion laws probably had NO impact on slaves! Slaves weren’t actually humans in the eyes of the law, so why would their offspring have any?
In the 19th century, “the popular ethic regarding abortion and common law were grounded in the female experience of their own bodies.”*
Abortion, at the time, was considered “restoration of the menses”.
Restoring menses in slaves was NOT what Sims was trying to do!
And nor was population control or planned parenthood his priority, either.
Moreover, US abortion law, at the time, mainly concerned itself with poison-control:
“UNTIL the last third of the nineteenth century, when it was criminalized state by state across the land, abortion was legal before “quickening” (approximately the fourth month of pregnancy).”**
*********************************************************************************
Sims was not trying to “abort” the babies during their own birth.
If he had wanted to do that, he could have adminstered herbal infusions, or he could have flushed uterus of a slave with injected salt water.
What he was trying to do, was move the bones of their skulls around because he thought that they wouldn’t have tetanus that way. That is quite clear. From what I can gather he did this whilst they were being born, or just before.
***
Many, if not all, the African nationalities and ethnicities who were “freighted” to the Americas as slaves were themselves skilled herbalists, many of them superior in medicine and the healing arts than the European Americans they were forced to slave under.
Naturally, they would and could, adapt their knowledge to their new environment on the soil of the Americas.
And, not least in the area of abortifacients, herbs to induce abortion.
Parts of that knowledge was retained and passed down, depending on circumstance, and some slaves knew how to abort a pregnancy.
* http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97may/abortion.htm
** http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft967nb5z5&chunk.id=d0e195&toc.id=d0e71&brand=ucpress
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“Sharina
@ Da Jokah
Do you? Because based on what I read of your Wikipedia source you don’t.”
Linda says,
FYI Sharina and everyone….
Da Jokah doesn’t sit around and find these “defenses against black achievements” all by himself.
These white racists have a websites DEDICATED to discrediting black people/Africans: this where Da Jokah and others like him “learn” how to jump through hoops like the monkeys, so they can defend white history:
http://topconservativenews.com/2014/02/history-channel-insults-the-west-with-new-black-history-myth/
“ A new documentary on the history of America contained a fresh new whopper of a lie. The new History channel documentary “America: The Story of Us” says that George Washington and the continental army learned how to inoculate themselves against smallpox from Negro slaves.
This lie is clearly tantamount to libel against Western Civilization as well as the English physician who really developed the smallpox inoculation. In the past, these politically motivated pseudo-documentaries have claimed that Muslims taught inoculation to the West. This is the first time that inoculation has ever been attributed to Negroes from Africa.
The Myth: Onesimus, a Sudanese slave owned by Massachusetts Puritan Pamphleteer Cotton Mather taught Americans how to inoculate against smallpox. Onesimus brought the technique to America from the Sudan.
The Truth: Variolation against the smallpox virus was spread all over the Muslim world by the Ottoman Empire. It is plausible that Arab slave traders even administered it to their slaves in the Sudan. However there is no actual evidence that Mather learned this from his slave. Variolation was also used in China and India, both of which claim to have used it hundreds of years before the Turks.
so according to these white racist pricks, EVERYONE else is a liar but them.. because these white racist geniuses hold the clue to the TRUTH of the past, present and future !!!
Disgusting—– this is just how FAR white racists like Da Jokah are willing to go just so they can diminish ANY achievement that is credited to black people or Africans
in their quest to LIE about Africans, these white racists are making up their own facts — it’s not enough that western history has managed to omit information all these years, when historians decide to correct the omission, you have white racist like DaJokah and his fellow racists, going “bat sh’t crazy” (as Bill Maher likes to say)
according to history, the slave Onesimus, was “Garamantee” — not Sudanese
Sudan is not ALL of Africa
and if Da Jokah knows so much about African ethnic groups, I’ll let him figure out which “country” Onesimus was really from and which region
clue: it wasn’t east or north and also, and historians spelled the ethnic groups name incorrectly
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@ Biff,
A question to you about offensiveness.
No one is suggesting that you may not call the unborn “sub human” if you want to.
But, as you are clearly so sensitive, I am wondering why you would find consider this word, sub-human, to be the most “appropriate” placement in a discussion about black people? You mentioned Nazi experimentation here:
As you know, the Nazis operated on people they considered sub-human, or Untermensch“.
Of course you must have realize that the word “sub human” is also racialized word, and is offensive.
I am a little curious why you would use this term, in this context, in a discussion about black slaves used for medical experiments by a white doctor…
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/deruntermensch.html
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^ Linda
Thank you for pointing out that blogsite. The whole thing seems focused on how to normalize and enhance whiteness in opposition to blackness. In other words, their whole sense of whiteness is based on not being black – such a fragile concept of self.
Calling it “Conservative News” is a strange misnomer.
Yes, and Da Jokah seems to be copying from there. 😛
However, I did find a link on there to the following article from China Daily, China’s English language daily.
“Why black-Asian tensions persist”
http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2014-01/10/content_17228648.htm
I don’t like the way it is being used in the blogsite, but I like the fact that an article addresses this unspoken tension. Maybe I’ll continue this train of thought on the Open Thread.
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“Da Jokah
Everything I’ve read said it was. Including the wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation#Sudan
Similar methods were seen through the Middle East and Africa. Two similar methods were described in Sudan during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Both had been long established and stemmed from Arabic practices.
There’s no concrete proof. But the circumstantial evidence overwhelmingly supports an east to west spread of the variolation technique. Which is why mainstream scholarly publications say it.”
Linda says,
Smallpox is said to have originated in northeast Africa and introduced to India.
“first appeared in agricultural settlements in northeastern Africa around 10,000 B.C.E. Egyptian merchants spread it from there to India.”
Click to access small%20pox.pdf
historians have said one form of inoculation practice may have come from India in 1000 AD and then spread to middle east and China but it would stand to reason, that since that the disease came from northeast Africa, knowledge of immunity would have travelled with them also into India — nothing is done in a vacuum.
there were different methods for inoculation, which is said to have developed independent of each other. the Chinese blew the virus up people’s noses using straws, one method in India was wearing peoples shirts… the Africans introduced the virus through a slit in their arms.
page 40
http://books.google.com/books?id=ZunWRQ5_2TAC&pg=PA40&lpg=PA40&dq=African+smallpox+variolation,+developed+independently&source=bl&ots=ZMDtzdR3KG&sig=Ey0VDXV4mic3a562VbOtxzSPfNE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wDAzU_SsDtHwoAS1_IKQBA&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=African%20smallpox%20variolation%2C%20developed%20independently&f=false
Your post is discussing methods that were seen in Sudan that were similar to the methods in the Middle East.
no were in that paragraph does it say “All of Africa” and inoculation was practice throughout the continent. so your circumstantial evidence shows nothing, and it especially does not suggest an East to West travel pattern in Africa
as usual, you like to misrepresent the article you bring in and leave out relevant facts. What the scholarly publications say. is that in Europe, the inoculation came from east to west, meaning Asia to Europe— it does not say that it was an east to west spread in Africa.
most western scholarly publications are mainly focus on Europe:
http://www.academia.edu/3029615/The_Introduction_of_Variolation_a_la_Turca_to_the_West_by_Lady_Mary_Montagu_and_Turkeys_Contribution
“The technique of variolation was used by various ancient civilizations such as those in India, Tibet and many other parts of Asia. It was based on the subcutaneous inoculation of attenuated pustule material in patients. The method was brought to Anatolia by the Seljuks through the Caucasus and was widely used by the Ottomans for a long period of time.
The West learned of this method for the first time mainly through the writings of Dr. Timoni and Lady Mary W. Montagu (1717). Lady Montagu not only wrote letters explaining this method, but also worked actively to introduce it in Europe.”
This information was already given to the white Americans by 1706 by the west African, Onesimus
I don’t have any sources that discuss which direction in Africa inoculation practices spread, but it is stated by “scholarly publications” that inoculation was practiced locally throughout all parts of Africa:
Inoculation for smallpox, the forerunner of vaccination, has had a long and variegated history. The earliest known descriptions of the practice in sub-Saharan Africa were given by African slaves in colonial America in the early and mid-eighteenth century. Subsequently it is mentioned in accounts from widely scattered parts of the continent. It seems to have been most extensively used in the Western and Central Sudan, Ethiopia and Southern Africa. Local diffusion patterns emerge from the evidence available at this time, but broader questions of origin must await further investigation. Similarly it is as yet impossible to assess its demographic impact in Africa although it clearly provided some defence against smallpox in spite of the risks involved.
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/180496?uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21103742185497
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@Linda
I believe the source he used actually mentions some of what you are saying above. One part in particular mentions that it was widespread throughout Africa by 1600. Though I figured you would be much more eloquent in your response to him so I simply waited for you to respond.
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jefe:
– Slavery is still widely practiced in the West, including right in the USA, benefiting people exactly where it is being practiced.
Can you clarify that statement…?
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linda “it would stand to reason, that since that the disease came from northeast Africa, knowledge of immunity would have travelled with them also into India”
Not if they didn’t have knowledge of immunity. And there is absolutely no evidence that knowledge of immunity existed in Africa prior to India, China or the Middle East.
You’ve provided no evidence (circumstantial or otherwise) for your claim that Africans invented variolation and spread it to Arabs.
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@Uncle Milton
Which part of the statement do you not understand or require further clarification? I tried to use as simple language as possible.
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@Da Jokah
Your sources does not provide evidence to your claim either. As per the second source it states “Arab were probably key disseminators of variolation.” Sure you were able to offer up sources, but none of which supports your claim that it was invented by Arabs. This explains why you quickly chose to clarify that nothing is concrete.
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There are no sources stating that the Arabs “invented” variolation either. The earliest record indicates India, but even they weren’t sure. The Africans had always traded with India, pre-Arab invasion — and information doesn’t travel in 1 direction.
Also, sources do say that variolations in Africa, China, and India may have been developed independently of each other.
“The practice may have developed independently in India, China, and Africa. Although some believe it was developed in India and spread from there.”
page 40
http://books.google.com/books?id=ZunWRQ5_2TAC&pg=PA40&lpg=PA40&dq=African+smallpox+variolation,+developed+independently&source=bl&ots=ZMDtzdR3KG&sig=Ey0VDXV4mic3a562VbOtxzSPfNE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wDAzU_SsDtHwoAS1_IKQBA&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=African%20smallpox%20variolation%2C%20developed%20independently&f=false
There are no real hard sources to back up either one of our claims.
You also have no sources saying that the Arabs “invented” variolation, they were key disseminators of the disease to the rest of North Africa and Europe. As your own source stated, wherever smallpox went, so did the variolation. Smallpox was already established in northeast Africa and travelled out from there. The Africans did manage to have relationships with other groups of people without the Arabs.
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sharina, linda
I never said Arabs invented variolation. I said they learned about it from either India or China. Which is a reasonable considering the oldest documented instance of variolation was in China.
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@ Da jokah
Actually this is more in line with what you said.
“Everything I’ve read said Arabs had variolation first and spread the technique to Africa.”
so while I have misspoken on what words you specific lyrics said. Your source still does not support what you stated above.
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Correction specifically said*
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Update: New York has removed the statue of Sims from Central Park as a hate symbol and moved it to his grave in Brooklyn.
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They should have thrown it in the garbage where it belongs, heck, why not recycle it?
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@ Herneith
A better place would be the African American Museum, where the entirety of this sadist’s story is told, punctuated by an audio track of blood curdling screams by Black women.
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this Dr. has nothing on many others like Rockefeller boy’s Dr. Dusty Rhoads..
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sorry typo’ correction Cornelius Packard “Dusty” Rhoads,,
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