Activist Michelle Browder buys site where J. Marion Sims experimented on slaves
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Artist and activist Michelle Browder has purchased the historic site 33 S. Perry St. in downtown Montgomery where J. Marion Sims once performed medical experiments on slaves. Now, Browder plans to build a $5.5 million museum and teaching clinic there to serve the community with a focus on the reproductive health of Black women, as well as a training center for doulas and midwives.
“It's a museum that teaches the history of gynecology but also has a primary care unit upstairs where medical students from around this country can come,” Browder said. “If there are some uninsured women that need support, we're going to be able to give them that.”
Sims became known as “the father of modern gynecology” in the 19th century because of techniques he learned while experimenting on Black women without anesthesia inside the makeshift surgical center that once stood on the site. Browder last year opened the nearby Mothers of Gynecology Park to honor three slaves known as Lucy, Betsey, and Anarcha who endured dozens of surgeries at the hands of Sims. She said the new museum and clinic will be another way to build understanding by flipping perspectives.
That’s also the goal behind a new mural she created to hang inside the clinic, which features Sims sitting naked on an exam table while the figures of Lucy, Betsey, and Anarcha study him. Two male doctors wearing dresses cautiously peek out from behind a curtain in the painting’s background. The mural, created with help from California artists Rachel Wolfe-Goldsmith and Zoe Boston, seems formed out of streaks of blood. It’s a take on a painting from the early 20th century by illustrator Robert Thom – part of a series known as “Great Moments in Medicine” – but with the roles reversed.
Browder said she had been haunted by the Thom original since the first time she saw it as a teenage art student, then was shocked when she came back to Montgomery after college and realized a statue of Sims still stands at the state’s Capitol building. She has shown and discussed the mural behind closed doors for the past month and been fascinated by their reactions.
“Some people laugh, some people cry,” she said. “J. Marion Sims represents so much more than just a medical practitioner that believed that Black folks had a high tolerance for pain, but he also represents systemic racism, whether it's in health care, whether it's in government.”
She said her hope is to use the on-site museum to tell a more complete and accurate history of Sims’ work, his patients, and the origin of gynecological medicine.
Browder worked with Boston-based MASS Design Group on the plan for the facility, which will be three floors. Sims’ clinic is gone, and her plan is to demolish a vacant building that now stands at the address.
They expect to break ground on Mother’s Day 2023.
Meanwhile, Browder’s nonprofit has been fundraising for the new clinic and museum.
“We're getting a lot of calls from around the country,” she said. “Some people like Possibility Labs supported us without seeing anything that we've done and just knowing what we're trying to do. ... We also have people like Tara Health Foundation, and (The David and Lucile) Packard Foundation that's coming through. They're smaller grants, but small adds up to, you know, a lot from what I from what I am learning.
“Little is much when God is in it. That's what my dad tells me.”
Browder said there’s a lot she was never taught about women’s bodies, and many of those conversations remain taboo today, even among healthcare providers. Her nonprofit already has programs geared toward girls ages 11 to 13, and the facility will give them space and resources to do more. Browder is already forming partnerships with medical programs at Historically Black Colleges and Universities across the nation.
“We will now be able to use it as a space to not just teach, but to (help) end this maternal health crisis that we're in,” she said. “Women are dying from fibroids. They’re losing children because of fibroids.
“We need to tap into finding a cure for that and providing a space where we can have a conversation.”
Brad Harper covers business and local government for the Montgomery Advertiser. Contact him at bharper1@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Activist Michelle Browder buys Sims surgical site, plans museum
