What Was Learned from Her Body: A Parallel History of Pain, and Permission
What Was Learned From Her Body is a literary nonfiction essay that traces one medical procedure across two centuries—and two women.
Told in parallel first-person voices, the piece follows Anarcha, an enslaved Black woman subjected to repeated experimental vesicovaginal fistula surgeries in the 1840s, and Emily, a modern white patient undergoing the same repair today in a fully equipped hospital.
The procedure is identical.
The conditions are not.
Through precise, sensory prose, this work examines:
- how pain is experienced versus how it is permitted to be expressed
- how consent, anesthesia, and care reshape suffering
- how modern gynecology is built on knowledge extracted from bodies that were never allowed to refuse
This is not a history lesson.
It is not a polemic.
It is not written to reassure.
Instead, What Was Learned From Her Body asks the reader to sit with an unresolved truth:
that modern medicine carries inheritances it rarely names—and benefits it did not earn alone.
Written with clinical accuracy and ethical restraint, this piece is intended for thoughtful readers, clinicians, educators, and anyone willing to engage medicine’s past without flattening it.
Content note: This work addresses medical trauma, enslavement, and surgical pain with care and restraint. No graphic imagery is used.