Do No Harm
Commissioned by the Association of Practical Theology, DO NO HARM, is a searing new play that gives voice to three enslaved women - Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy - who are mentioned in the autobiography of Dr. James Marion Sims’ aka “The Father of Gynecology.” These young women, who suffered from vesicovaginal fistula, served as “guinea pigs” for the 19th Century physician who performed numerous procedures and surgeries on them with no anesthesia under the racist notion that black people did not feel pain.
Soul Rep will produce the world premiere of this new work during its 2020-2021 season, in collaboration with Southern Methodist University’s School of Theology, who will utilize DO NO HARM as a teaching tool on “ethics.”
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Seeking humanity in horror: Dallas playwright explores slave women’s perspective on cruel experiments
‘Do No Harm’ by Soul Rep Theatre Company’s Anyika McMillan-Herod has postponed its staged readings until July.
Anyika McMillan-Herod has written about tough subjects before. Her 2014 play, The Ballad of Jane Elkins, tells the story of a slave who was the first person legally hanged in Dallas. She explores mental illness across three generations of a local African American family in her first novel, Looking for Grace. And another play, The Monarch, was inspired by her battle with breast cancer.
So it was right in McMillan-Herod’s wheelhouse to take on the work of 19th century physician James Marion Sims, the so-called father of gynecology, focusing on three patients he mentions in his autobiography.
They were among dozens of enslaved women that Sims operated on without anesthesia under the racist idea that black people didn’t feel pain. At a time when women of any race were rarely seen by doctors, especially for “female problems,” he was treating them for vesicovaginal fistula, a tear between the bladder and the wall of the vagina caused by complications from childbirth and other traumas.
Commissioned by a national theology association interested in ethics, Do No Harm, is scheduled to be performed in staged readings in July after the original dates were canceled by coronavirus concerns. The readings are presented by Echo Theatre and McMillan-Herod’s Soul Rep Theatre Company.
The Dallas native and graduate of Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts co-founded the company with Guinea Bennett-Price and Tonya Holloway after college in 1996. After seven seasons, they closed down to start families, then relaunched Soul Rep a decade later in 2013. McMillan-Herod, Soul Rep’s managing director, is also a poet and writes op-eds for The Dallas Examiner.
“I jumped at the chance to tell the story of Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy. I feel like it’s my responsibility,” she says at the Dallas Farmers Market over her lunch break from St. Philip’s School and Community Center, where she is a fundraiser. “As an African American woman, as an artist, these are the types of stories I gravitate to. It’s in my DNA.”
Except in intermittent voice-overs, the ambitious, sickly Sims, who sought fame and fortune through his work, who created the speculum medical tool still used today and who has been immortalized with public statues around the country, is not a character in the play.
Instead, the playwright imagines what life must have been like for his patients, teenagers and young women reluctantly handed over to him in the 1840s by other slaveholders in Montgomery, Ala., who feared for the loss of their property. The women lived behind his home in a cabin that served as a kind of hospital.
While Sims mentions the three by name, he doesn’t detail much of what they went through or what they were thinking as he experimented with new procedures he was inventing. And there are no other sources of information about their time with him. For that, McMillan-Herod turned to the plethora of published slave narratives for a glimpse into what Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy experienced.
She was particularly struck by a narrative that characterized slavery as “the meanness of it all.” It served as her jumping-off point to look at how human beings dealt with cruelty in a situation they had no control over.
“It was a process to take all of that in and challenge myself to give voice to the voiceless. That’s pretty much what this play explores, this era in our history,” she says.
“Slavery was what it was. These type of situations, where enslaved Africans were used as guinea pigs, is nothing new. It was a practice. But how can we explore this in a way to not just talk about the injustice and the inhumanity of that experience, but to humanize the moment, to look at it from their perspective?
"What was it like to be in a system where you had no voice, you had no say in the matter? How did someone who’s enslaved cope with the situation? How did you maintain a sense of self, a sense of dignity? I tried to put myself in that position.”
Do No Harm opens a few months before Sims finally found a cure for vesicovaginal fistula after performing 30 operations on Anarcha. The play depicts her screams, which startled the doctor and his preconceived notions. It also includes flashbacks depicting how each of them came under his care.
“I imagine each of the women’s first day with Dr. Sims,” McMillan-Herod explains. “How were these women specifically chosen? What did that transaction look like? And in the midst of their current situation unfolding, making tea, having conversations about missing their children back home, because some of them are with him for years, having their bodies violated and not being with their families as well, having to create a new family.”
In addition to the real-life characters, McMillan-Herod invents a poor, pregnant white woman who serves as a messenger between Sims and his patients. The play depicts their lives between the many surgeries, what they talk about and how they help one another heal, she says. “I wanted to focus on this atrocity, this incubator of pain. How can this become their sanctuary?”
Manuel Mendoza is a Dallas freelance writer and former staff critic at The Dallas Morning News.