Around Alabama, South Carolina, and even in New York City, you’ll find statues of J. Marion Sims.

What you won’t find are statues or, for that matter, many mentions of Anarcha.

Back in the mid-to-late 1800s, Sims, a surgeon, performed at least 30 experiments on Anarcha, a slave woman, in a quest for a way to treat a 19th century childbirth complication that caused many women to leak urine from their vaginas after developing connections between it and their bladder. Eventually, he was successful -- and has been lauded as the father of modern gynecology ever since.

But even though Sims developed a treatment for an embarrassing and painful ailment that still afflicts many Third World women today, there’s no ignoring the fact that he built his legacy off of the pain of slaves like Anarcha. Women like her endured the experiments with no anesthesia. They also endured it amid times in which people like Sims believed that black people’s pain and anonymity were merely part of the landscape of privilege to which whites believed they were entitled.

I got to thinking about Anarcha’s story after reading about how another captive, disproportionately-black population could wind up being reduced to guinea pig status. Recently, a federal panel of medical advisers recommended that the government lighten up on regulations that restrict prison inmates from being used as subjects in pharmaceutical tests.

According to The New York Times, such testing all but ended more than three decades ago, after some prisoners were exposed to dangerous substances such as dioxin. Leodus Jones, a former inmate at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg prison in the 1960s, told the Times that lotion tests caused him to develop rashes, and his skin to change color.

We don’t need to go down that road again.

Now, I understand that it’s tough to make medical progress without some human experimentation. There’s also a possibility that some of the inmates who participate in the pharmaceutical tests might wind up helping companies find cures for ailments that disproportionately dog black people.

Still, the whole notion doesn’t sit right with me. Mostly because it makes me think of how, even though black inmates aren’t slaves as Anarcha was, when it comes to such experimentation, being behind prison walls still makes them vulnerable to becoming slaves not only to coercion, but to their own desperation.

One of the reasons that drug companies are looking to test more on prisoners now is because many of them haven’t been able to get large enough populations of non-inmates to test on. That’s one of the reasons why Vioxx was pulled from the market. Proponents argue that with greater oversight, the possibility for abuse will be minimal.

But that’s naive thinking. Oversight in prisons never works as well as people intend it to. On top of that, pharmaceutical companies tend to be driven more by profits than by principle -- and we all know that when the drive to make money kicks in, those who fuel the engines for that drive are ridden to the core.

There’s also another reason why I hate this.

The United States now is the world’s bigger jailer, thanks to lopsided numbers of black men being imprisoned for crimes that could be prevented if this country had the will to revitalize their communities economically. Many of the black men in prison are there because of crimes related to the crack cocaine trade -- a trade that has moved into black communities as jobs and amenities have moved out.

So, what I don’t like is the fact that once again, this country can’t seem to find any use for black men until they are confined. When they are on the outside, they are pushed out of jobs and education, and out of all the things that could help them avoid a life of crime, but once incarcerated, their worth increases.

They become valuable to private prison-building corporations, who capitalize on their pathology to create prison jobs for rural white people. They become valuable to prison industries, where they work for meager wages in manufacturing jobs that either don’t exist on the outside, or no one will hire them to do.

And now, they’re becoming valuable to medical research and to pharmaceutical companies -- companies whose drugs they or their relatives probably wouldn’t be able to afford without planning to eat oatmeal for a week.

Yet, it’s not surprising that someone would get around to finding another reason to exploit this modern-day slavery -- the slavery of mass incarceration. And while some prisoners might wind up helping a company or scientist make history by hiring their bodies out to test a treatment for a certain sickness, chances are no one will ever care about the societal and economic ills that led to their imprisonment.

Nor, like Anarcha, will people even see their names.