Susann Cokal, who contributed “Making Friends with Midge” to our first issue–and who serves as Broad Street‘s Editorial Director–won the Gemini Magazine 2019 Fiction Prize for her story “A Spoon Will Catch the Dark Girls’ Pain.”

“A Spoon Will Catch” is a look at the life of J. Marion Sims, often called the Father of Modern Gynecology and credited with inventing the speculum. He experimented with his invention by operating on enslaved women kept in a converted chicken coop in his backyard. Cokal explores Sims’s life and work through the perspectives of his wife, his daughters, and the women on whom he experimented, as well as his own memoirs.

The story can be read here, on Gemini‘s website.

Featured image: Sims, c. 1880

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