“A Diagnosis Is an Ending”

J. Marion Sims’s reputation has been undergoing a sustained reevaluation for some time now by medical ethicists and historians. Visual artists Kenya and Doreen Garner’s 2017 exhibition, White Man on a Pedestal, foregrounds the bodies and experiences of the enslaved black women who were J. Marion Sims’s patients. Bettina Judd connects the roles explicitly in her collection, citing a passage in J. Marion Sims’s autobiography that recalls his meeting with P. T. Barnum as the epigraph to the poem “The Calculus of Us.” The sickness, Bettina Judd suggests, is both acute and endemic to system, built into empathetic failures that characterize racial empathy gap and misprisions that leads to overlook what’s in plain sight.