Plog Number 272
Sims Position
Hello Ploggers, how are you. I hope that the wind is at your backside and that it helps push you along the way. Today is the first day of February 2024 and in my neck of the woods it was 55 degrees at 4 pm. When I left work and walked to the car, I was shocked. I was doing the usual bracing for the cold and it wasn’t there. Also I looked up and saw the sun this afternoon. It was strong and unfiltered by clouds. Wow wee!! My nephew sent me a meme that said “we had the 3rd cloudiest January of all time, 26 of 31 days had 80% cloud cover” So February came in with a pleasantly unexpected and sunny🌞 bang.
I have learned some very disturbing facts that have affected my life and I am not at all happy about it. Years ago I attended nursing school. As all new students I learned nursing fundamentals. One of the most basic things you learn are how to position a patient for comfort. Positioning aids in many things from comfort to digestion and many, many different procedures. There are many different positions that nurses use routinely. Here are some of the positions: Supine, Prone, Fowlers, High Fowlers, Lithotomy, Trendelenburg, Reverse Trendelenburg and lateral positions. The one that has always stayed in my head and that I have used on hundreds of patients is the Sims Position. It is basically turning your patient to lie on their left side. There is something about the anatomy that allows gas to flow easily and for digestion to be aided. Its kind of the sweet spot for patients to lay in when you don’t know what else to do with them. It works 9 out of 10 times.
The burr that is under my saddle about the left lateral sims position is the person credited with developing it. The position was named after surgeon Dr. James Marion Sims. He is called the Father of modern gynecology. He developed his techniques by experimenting on enslaved women in Alabama in the 1840’s. Lets talk about Sims. He was a slave owner and he did experimental gynecological surgery exclusively on black women. These women were bound to Sim’s surgical table by physical force and Opium. Many women were said to have become addicted to the Opium which did not allay their pain. He did not use anesthesia because he believed that back people did not experience pain like white people did. He also believed that black people’s skulls grew too quickly around their brains, making them less intelligent. He did some bone widening on infants to correct this.
Sims helped develop the speculum and is credited with the surgical repair of vesiculo-vaginal fistula from childbirth. He realized that he needed to see inside women to diagnose and treat their problems. The young women screamed and writhed in pain in front of Sims and rooms full of other male observers. He positioned them on all fours, leaning forward, then used his fingers to help him see inside. His precursor to the speculum was the bent handle of a pewter spoon. Being able to bear children was a necessity for slave women. He was a South Carolinian who was a slave owner. As was customary at this time he took a three month course and studied a year at Jefferson Medical College. He moved to Montgomery, Alabama seeking a fresh start after the death of his first two patients. His business flourished and was used by slave-owners who had injured slaves and needed them to be fixed and up for more work. During this time there was little interest in treating female o+0rgans. The work was considered offensive and unsavory. Sims, however took an interest in the work. He took temporary ownership of his subjects, This gave him 24 hour access to the women. He is quoted in his book The Story of My Life to say “There was never a time that I could not, at any day, have had a subject for operation, This, he said was the most “memorable time” of his life,” After four years of experimentation he started to operate on white women, and on those women he used anesthesia.
So you see this is why I am appalled to learn that the innocent “Sims” position that I learned about in nursing school is named after that ghoulish monster. Sims preceded Josef Mengele by almost 100 years. Racism in this country is impossible to steer clear of. It is built in the very foundation, even in the medical field. From the state of South Carolina we had Marion Sims a sadistic racist. Also from the state of South Carolina we have Tim Scott and Nimrata Haley stating that this is not a racist country. Make it make sense. RECLAIM!
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