I'm afraid the ARC version was slow and painful to read, due to the medical horrors of the subject and because it was poorly organized. When I finally finished it after seven months, I read through the intro again - which had excited me in the first place, since Hallman said he was aiming to increase the amount known about Anarcha herself and not focusing on Sims... and in the ARC, at least, he failed at that goal. I could not tell if he forgot that plan or if he just did not have enough information about her and over-promised. He did not glorify Sims, he portrays Sims as a fairly terrible and arrogant man, but he did not focus on Anarcha even remotely as much as he'd said he would. I have no interest in reading the released version to see if it's better - or in reading anything more from Hallman. ( )

super interesting history and bringing to light (with what had to be an incredible amount of research) the past in both a readable and interesting way, but also a way that really delves into the truth of the time and the lie that history has perpetuated. an important book to set the record straight.

i'm ashamed that something as obvious as this never occurred to me: "There were bigger plantations, however, older plantations where the making and selling of babies was no different from, or was maybe more profitable than the growing of cotton or sugar." ( )

I have been a medical librarian for over fifteen years and have always been fascinated by medical history. I was pleased to be given an advance reader's edition of SAY ANARCHA as a review book for LibraryThing. It is obvious that a lot of work and research has gone into collecting information for this book standing at 422 pages. It is also obvious that the author was passionate about his topic. What I found lacking was organization of the information which led to me putting the book down several times and making myself return to read more after long absences. I decided to scan through the book but again found myself lost from the details and had to go back and read page by page to have any understanding of the progression of information. -- The book would have been much more engaging if it had been grouped in cohesive chapters -- the state of early medicine -- slave culture in the southern states -- slave medicine -- Dr. Sims -- Anarcha -- even a chapter on natural events for Halley's Comet and the night The Stars Fell on Alabama. I was glad that Anarcha was found and given her part in women's medical history -- but I think she was lost again among the ramblings that I'm not sure really helped the book.There are times that I'm left wandering, "What has that got to do with the story of Anarcha?" Even a few things that proved later to be part of the story could have been shortened down from several pages to a few paragraphs.
I still want to know the rest of Anarcha's story and may pick it up again. But the topic may not be suitable for everyone -- the world of the slave is one of a commodity and it shows a hard, cruel treatment which crosses the border into horror and torture. Even Anarcha realizes very early in her life that she is not a person but a thing. Dr. Sims is described as an American Mengele performing experimental surgeries in his backyard "Negro Hospital" using enslaved women without anesthesia. The book could benefit from an index of topics. There are some illustrations and images from old documents -- some are fuzzy and hard to make out. Topics: Medical History, Women's History, Research, Biography, Slaves ( )

I have mixed feelings about this book because there were so many threads and tangents it was hard to discern an arc to the story. The author cites that is speculative nonfiction necessitated by the fact that Anarcha (or Annacay?) was a slave and could not write to leave any personal historical account. It's clear the author did a lot of research to track down the stories of J. Marion Sims as well as Anarcha, but as I was reading an ARC there was no bibliography or end notes and only indistinct photo copies of materials the author came across during his research.

What I learned from reading this book:
- There are graphic and horrible descriptions of the state of slavery in South Carolina and Alabama in the 1830's up until the Civil War.
- More graphic descriptions of difficult births with macabre medical attempts to deal with them.
- Granular detail of J. Marion Sims' life. Including his shameless self promotion as he sought wealth and fame without much regard for treating patients, mostly women and slaves, humanely and with dignity.
- Speculations about Anarcha's thoughts, feelings, and reactions to her own condition and that of her cohort.

The narrative is rambling and circles back on itself. The author includes a lot of detail about the teachers and associates of J. Marion Sims that reinforce the dominance of wealthy white males in medicine, their petty jealousies and rivalries, and their contempt of slaves and women. Beyond that, what is the point of including all these people?
I'm also not sure what the point was including the celestial events (meteor showers & a comet) in the narrative, the author doesn't make that clear.

In summary, this book could have used some tighter editing to create a story arc and clearly define what the author wants us to know and understand.

By far the most interesting part to me is the afterward in which the author describes the current efforts to prevent and treat obstetric fistula in African countries. ( )

Author J.C. Hallman says in his introduction that this is a work of “informed speculation,” as indeed it has to be, given that a biography of an illiterate, enslaved woman has little in the way of written record to document it. The all-too-brief portions that tell Annacay Jackson’s story, even though they may have the least historical accuracy, are the living heart of this book and possibly the truest. Unfortunately, another of Hallman’s objectives is to set history straight about the titular “devious surgeon” J. Marion Sims, who Hallman points out has been called the “American Mengele,” and his story takes up far more of the narrative and is by far less interesting.

I imagine much of the narrative about Sims is needed to unravel what already exists in medical history. As the book makes clear, not the least through Sims association with P.T. Barnum, Sims excelled at self-promotion and self-aggrandizement. It appears that Sims did virtually nothing out of a desire to improve anyone’s quality of life but his own. I wish we had been spared so much detail of this man’s life, and details of the lives of other white men, and been given more “informed speculation” about the lives of Annacay and her family and associates. I wish instead of a lot of historical facts about troop movements and Confederate Navy actions, Union and Confederate political machinations in Europe, and other doings of white men, there was more about how the Civil War affected the enslaved African Americans on the plantations where Annacay lived and worked.

I also wonder why Hallman chose to call Anarcha by that name, which he points out exists only in Sims’s dubious accounts of his surgeries, when it seems more likely that Annacay, which appears on her gravestone, or Ankey, as it seems she was most often called, was her real name.

This was a valuable story to have told, and I’m glad I read it. I only wish there had been a better balance between retelling Sims’s story and telling the unknown story of Annacay. ( )