"J.C. Hallman discusses 'Say Anarcha,' a book about experiments on enslaved women" Morning Edition
"Author's Search for Anarcha Leads him to King George" The Free Lance-Star
"J.C. Hallman with Tavis Smiley" The Tavis Smiley Podcast
"The Troubling Origins of Gynecology" WGN-TV
"J.C. Hallman, author of Say Anarcha" The Holistic Ob-Gyn
"The C.O.W.S. w/ J.C. Hallman: Say Anarcha, J. Marion Sims & The Torture of Black Females" C.O.W.S.
"The Founder of Gynecology & The Enslaved Woman He Experimented On" Letters and Politics
"J.C. Hallman on 'Say Anarcha'" Leonard Lopate at Large
"Podcast #168 - J.C. Hallman" BIO International
"What's Health Got to Do with It?" What's Health Got to Do with It?
"Exploring Speculative Biography Through J. C. Hallman’s ‘Say Anarcha’" Biographers International Organization
"Anarcha: One of the Mothers of Gynecology" Professor Buzzkill
"'Say Anarcha' with J.C. Hallman" Ask Historians
"New book explores legacy of SC’s ‘father of modern gynecology’ and his tests on enslaved women" Post & Courier
"Say Anarcha" Faculti
"Say Anarcha" Studio Tulsa
"Reading and Writing Podcast" Reading and Writing Podcast
“J.C. Hallman with Lydia Moland” The Brooklyn Rail
"The Blurred Boundaries Between Fact and Fiction" Literary Hub
"Out of the Shadows" Publisher's Weekly
“Legacies Lost and Found” JSTOR Daily
“Monumental Error” Harper's
“Memorializing a Medical Predator” African American Policy Forum
"The Cry of Alice" The Baffler
“J. Marion Sims and the Civil War — a rollicking tale of deceit and spycraft” Montgomery Advertiser
“J. Marion Sims statue: A questionable monument in a questionable place” Montgomery Advertiser
"Like it Or Not, Cancel Culture is Free Speech" The Nation
"Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey: The Mothers of Modern Gynecology" Urology

Say Anarcha

In 1846, a young surgeon, J. Marion Sims (“The Father of Gynecology”), began several years of experimental surgeries on a young enslaved woman known as Anarcha (“The Mother of Gynecology”). This series of procedures—performed without anesthesia and resulting in Anarcha’s so-called “cure”—forever altered the path of women’s health. Despite brutal practices and failed techniques, Sims proclaimed himself the curer of obstetric fistula, a horrific condition that had stymied the medical world for centuries. Parlaying supposed success to the founding of a new hospital in New York City—where he conducted additional dangerous experiments on Irish women—Sims went on to a profitable career treating gentry and royalty in Europe, becoming one of the world’s first celebrity surgeons. Medical text after medical text hailed Anarcha as a pivotal figure in the history of medicine, but little was recorded about the woman herself.

Through extensive research, author J.C. Hallman has unearthed the first evidence ever found of Anarcha’s life that did not come from Sims’s suspect reports. With incredible tenacity, Hallman traced Anarcha’s path from her beginnings on a Southern plantation, to the backyard clinic where she was subjected to scores of painful surgical experiments, to her years after in Richmond and New York City, and to her final resting place in a lonely Virginia forest.

When Hallman first set out to find Anarcha, the world was just beginning to grapple with the history of white supremacy and its connection to racial health disparities exposed by Covid-19 and the disproportionate number of Black women who die while giving birth. In telling the stories of the “Mother” and “Father” of gynecology, SAY ANARCHA excavates the history of a heroic enslaved woman and deconstructs the biographical smokescreen of a surgeon that history has falsely enshrined as a heroic pioneer. Kin in spirit to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Hallman’s dual biographical narratives tell a single story that corrects errors calcified in history and illuminates the sacrifice of a young woman who changed the world only to be forgotten by it—until now.