All What's You Should Know

A medical hell recounted by its victims Harriet A. Washington weighs up a play about enslaved women subjected to experimental surgery in the nineteenth century. Two African American women hold another African American on a table Left to right: Nia Calloway, Joel Ripka, Naomi Lorrain, Stephen James Anthony and Cristina Pitter in Behind the Sheet.Credit: Jeremy Daniel 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. Sims sought to repair horribly disabling complications of protracted childbirth —including vesicovaginal fistulas — that cause constant leaking of urine and faeces. The resulting pain, infection, odour ...