Episode 165: Unfit

In August 1934, Ann Cooper Hewitt was having lunch with her mother when she suddenly felt pain in her abdomen. When she went to the doctor, he told her she would have to have her appendix removed. He never examined her abdomen. She later told papers that when she woke up from surgery, she heard a nurse saying that Ann “didn’t suspect a thing.”

Audrey Clare Farley’s book is The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt.

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