The Dark History of White Medicine

        As I was reading about the lobotomy (pseudo or not) performed on the narrator in Chapter 11, I was reminded of the brutal history and relation between white doctors and black people, specifically female slaves. The chapter begins with the narrator being forced to swallow an unknown medicine. After losing consciousness, he wakes to white doctors and nurses surrounding him as he undergoes a series of electrical shocks. As the shocks are being administered, one of the doctors argues that these primitive methods would not be used on someone that, “were a New Englander with a Harvard background?” (236). They are rebutted by another doctor that claims the narrator will, “experience no major conflict of motives, and what is even better, society will suffer no traumata on his account” (236). Another doctor adds, “Why not castration, doctor?” (236).  The doctors continue to call the narrator “boy” and laugh at his suffering, exclaiming, “They really do have rhythm, don’t they? Get hot, boy! Get hot!” (237). After the narrator cannot remember his own name and struggles to answer a few more questions, he is released from the factory hospital, providing he does one more thing for the doctors. The narrator signs a set of papers “releasing the company of responsibility” and is compensated for it (247). Near the end of the chapter, the narrator remarks, “We, he, him-my mind and I-were no longer getting around in the same circles. Nor my body either” (250). 

The doctors in this scene use the narrator’s background of being from the South as substantial grounds to proceed with the procedure. Despite getting as far away from the South as he can, the narrator is still followed by his past and categorized immediately because of the color of his skin. The doctors believe that they are not only doing the narrator, but society as a whole, a favor by proceeding with the electrical shock lobotomy. In this belief they feel that the lobotomy has the power to transform the supposed “criminal” narrator into an “amiable fellow”, despite not knowing a single thing about him.

The narrator has no autonomy in this situation. With every scream, he is silenced and with every movement, he is mocked and ridiculed through gross stereotypes. After the lobotomy is finished, the narrator is so severely traumatized and affected by this event that he cannot even remember his own name nor his mother’s. He is compensated into being quiet, a way of putting money in the White Man’s pocket without anyone ever knowing what really happened. The narrator leaves the hospital completely detached from himself and his identity, both in a physical and mental sense. 

James Marion Sims was one of the most world renowned American surgeons in the 19th century and was dubbed the “father of modern gynecology”. Sims is credited with making major medical breakthroughs, such as the surgical technique for the repair of vesicovaginal fistula, Sims’ speculum, the Sims’ position, and Sims’ sigmoid catheter. However, there were hidden victims of these medical innovations that the public did not see. 

Sims operated on black slave women without the use of anesthesia, all nonconsensual, as approval from their owners were the only requirement of law at the time. These acts were excused by the gross assumptions that black people did not feel pain and that the women were grateful that these procedures were being done on them. When Sims performed these procedures, he would position the patients in perverted positions, completely naked. The patients would be screaming out in pain with about 12 other doctors in the room observing. After Sims “perfected” the procedure, it was used on white women with anesthesia. Sims' inhumane practices continued to enslaved babies. Practices that are, in my opinion, too graphic to write about here (search Sims trismus nascentium procedure if you want to know). Regardless, Sims’ repeated use of black women and children as guinea pigs to further his own medical advancements were overlooked, with statues and plaques being erected in his name and image. 

In both instances of the narrator and of Sims’ patients we see the cruel stereotypes and treatment of black people faced in the medical world both then and now. While the electrical lobotomy may be improbable, the ideas and symbolism behind it are not. Many parallels can be drawn from the narrator’s experience and that of the patients of Sims. Ellison highlights the lack of autonomy that black men, women, and children have over their bodies in the narrator’s suffering and neglect of the doctors. Not only are both patients (narrator and Sims’) dehumanized and mocked, their contributions to their doctor’s medical advancements are swept under the rug and hidden from the rest of the world. Their doctors get plaques and honors, and they cannot even remember their names, endure insufferable pain, and even die. These are not coincidences, they are intentional.

Sources: https://www.history.com/news/the-father-of-modern-gynecology-performed-shocking-experiments-on-slaves

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Marion_Sims