25 min
On the Need to Reclaim Gynecology’s Troubled Legacy The Dose
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- Health & Fitness
Montgomery, Alabama’s capital, is known as the birthplace of gynecology. It’s a brutal history, as the field’s “founding father,” J. Marion Sims, advanced his work through the experimentation on enslaved women and babies. Artist and health care activist Michelle Browder has forced a reckoning with this legacy with one clear goal — we need to talk about the mothers.
On the newest episode of The Dose podcast, host Joel Bervell talks to Browder about her efforts to honor Sims’s victims — the names of only three of whom we know today: Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. They also discuss Browder’s work to channel the painful legacy of the past into a healthier future for Black women and their babies, as she prepares to open a midwifery clinic and birthing center as well as a national education center for medical students.
Montgomery, Alabama’s capital, is known as the birthplace of gynecology. It’s a brutal history, as the field’s “founding father,” J. Marion Sims, advanced his work through the experimentation on enslaved women and babies. Artist and health care activist Michelle Browder has forced a reckoning with this legacy with one clear goal — we need to talk about the mothers.
On the newest episode of The Dose podcast, host Joel Bervell talks to Browder about her efforts to honor Sims’s victims — the names of only three of whom we know today: Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. They also discuss Browder’s work to channel the painful legacy of the past into a healthier future for Black women and their babies, as she prepares to open a midwifery clinic and birthing center as well as a national education center for medical students.
25 min