A surgeon experimented on slave women without anesthesia
Now his statues are under attack
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s DeNeen L. Brown.
Amid demands to remove Confederate statues across the country, cries have grown louder to dismantle monuments to J. Marion Sims, the “father of gynecology,” a white 19th-century doctor who performed surgical experiments on enslaved black women without anesthesia.
Over the weekend, a Sims statue in New York City, where he established the first hospital for women in 1855, was vandalized.
“RACIST” was spray-painted on the Central Park monument, and splotches of red paint were used to deface the statue’s eyes and neck.
The city is considering whether to remove the statue, located on 5th Avenue at 103rd Street.
What Sims is known for
- Invented the speculum and other instruments still in use today
- Pioneered surgery for fistula, a condition that left women incontinent after giving birth
- Performed the first successful gallbladder surgery and the first successful artificial insemination
Disturbing ethical choices
To make those advances, Sims performed experimental surgeries on enslaved women. His legacy has long been questioned by those who believe he used black women as medical guinea pigs without their consent.
A look at Sims’ history
- Sims opened a medical practice in South Carolina, but his practice “failed within the year after two infants under his treatment died.”
- Sims moved to Alabama and settled in Macon County, where he began working as a doctor treating enslaved people on local plantations.
- He built a hospital with 16 beds, Sims wrote in his autobiography, “The Story of My Life.”
- He began trying to treat fistula, a catastrophic injury from childbirth that at the time was considered incurable.
- Sims described surgeries performed on enslaved patients, including Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey.
Sims wrote that he made a “proposition to owners of negroes: If you will give me Anarcha and Betsey for experiment, I agree to perform no experiment or operation on either of them to endanger their lives and will not charge a cent for keeping them, but you must pay their taxes and clothe them. I will keep them at my own expense.”
- He then moved to New York, where he established the first hospital for women in 1855.
Sims statues in Alabama and South Carolina
- Protesters have demanded removal of a monument to Sims on the capitol grounds in Columbia, S.C., the state where Sims was born. The state health department building is also named in his honor.
- A statue of Sims also stands on the capitol grounds in Montgomery, Ala. In 2005, a painting entitled “Medical Giants of Alabama” that depicted Sims and other white men standing over a partially clothed black patient was removed from the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Center for Advanced Medical Studies because of complaints from people offended by it.
According to a 2006 Washington Post article:
“Anarcha Wescott, Sims’s patient in the painting, endured 30 surgeries as Sims worked to perfect the technique. She was among about a dozen slaves on whom Sims operated repeatedly without anesthesia, which was just being developed and not widely used at the time. Some scholars have questioned whether the slaves gave or were capable of giving informed consent to the surgery, despite Sims’s claim they eagerly sought his cures.”
The Sims statue in New York City
The Black Youth Project 100, a group of social justice activists ages 18 to 35, staged the protests at the statute in New York. The activists wore hospital gowns splashed with red paint dripping down their legs.
