As statues honoring the Confederacy are protested, toppled, and removed across the U.S. and as the man in the White House refuses to disassociate himself and unequivocally condemn white supremacists and Nazis who are willing to kill to keep them standing, there are other monuments to inhumanity that are also under fire.
The statue of Dr. J. Marion Sims, pictured above, is one such monument. He has more than one:
A controversial bronze statue by Ferdinand Freiherr von Miller (the younger), depicting Sims in surgical wear, where it is located on the peripheral wall at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street, opposite the New York Academy of Medicine. Other memorials were installed on the grounds of his alma mater, Jefferson Medical College, and in both the South Carolina State Capitol in Columbia and Alabama's capitol in Montgomery. The historical marker of his birthplace honors him for “his service to suffering women. Empress and slave alike.”
What those historical markers don’t tell you is that Dr. Sims conducted his early surgical experiments on enslaved black women. Those experiments were done without anesthesia.
In an article titled “Father Butcher,” Wendy Brinker writes about Sims’ early medical career:
Acting primarily as a plantation physician, Sims became known for operations on clubfeet, cleft palates and crossed eyes. He began to treat enslaved babies suffering from what he called "trismus nascentium,” now known as neonatal tetanus. Tetanus originates in horse manure, and it’s probable the proximity of the slave quarters to the horse stables was the direct cause of the high rate of tetanus in enslaved babies. In an article published by Sims on the subject, he comes to quite another conclusion that offers us a glimpse into his personal views. "Whenever there are poverty, and filth, and laziness, or where the intellectual capacity is cramped, the moral and social feelings blunted, there it will be oftener found. Wealth, a cultivated intellect, a refined mind, an affectionate heart, are comparatively exempt from the ravages of this unmercifully fatal malady. But expose this class to the same physical causes, and they become equal sufferers with the first." Since he attributed the cause of the disease to the moral weakness of the enslaved Africans, he never suggested the need to improve their living conditions.
Sims also argued that the movement of the skull bones during a protracted birth contributed to trismus. Clearly designating patients by class and race, Sims began to exercise his freedom to experiment on the enslaved infants. He took custody of them and with a shoemaker's awl, a pointed tool used for making holes in leather, tried to pry the bones of their skulls into proper alignment. According to his published articles, this procedure was only practiced on enslaved African babies. Because he "owned" these poor, innocent children, he had free access to their bodies for autopsies, which he usually performed immediately after death. Sims routinely blamed "slave mothers and nurses for infant suffering, especially through their ignorance."
Enslaved African midwives were numerous throughout the South. For hundreds of years, childbirth was not considered a "sickness" and for the most part, physicians did not attend births. But in the mid-nineteenth century, the attitude of the white male medical practitioners towards midwifery was changing. Male-dominated medicine was now challenging female-governed childbirth. The African midwife’s spiritual traditions and knowledge of rituals and herbs handed down orally through generations earned her honor and respect among the enslaved. Just as the Southern physician was at the core of his social web, the midwife enjoyed the equivalent status. This could have fueled the white master's need to remove them from positions of prominence. The early obstetricians chose to exclude midwives from their research and utterly dismissed their collective knowledge. Reminiscent of witch-hunts, persecution of midwives by white males was beginning to play out again on southern plantations.
As the great-granddaughter of an enslaved midwife who never lost a child during a delivery, black or white, I am truly grateful that no doctors like Sims wound up on the Loudoun County, Virginia, plantation where she was held in bondage.
Sims is discussed in African American Bioethics: Culture, Race, and Identity:
The cruel experimentation of Dr. J. Marion Sims using slave women is documented in the two-volume series An American Health Dilemma: A Medical History of African Americans and the Problem of Race. This groundbreaking study of the medical history of African Americans is written by two physicians, W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton. They analyze the hostility and contempt with which the medical profession has approached the health and healing of African Americans. Their careful documentation of the horrifying legacy of unethical experimentation on black human subjects in the nineteenth century is exemplified by Sims, known as the “father” of gynecology and vaginal surgery, who developed his techniques by operating on slave women, one of whom he purchased for the express purpose of performing experimental gynecological surgery on her: “He performed repeated major surgical procedures…exposing their genitals to the public, without anesthesia—believing Blacks did not have morals or perceive pain as Whites did. Moreover, to manipulate their postoperative healing process he addicted them to opiates (equivalent to morphine or heroin) to modulate their bowel and bladder function. Medical exploitation of the Black slaves was accepted without comment.”16 Sims admitted to operating on one slave woman at least thirty times.
Byrd and Clayton reveal the ironic conclusion drawn by American medical scientists studying the effects of emancipation on black health, that “freedom had caused the physical, moral, and mental degeneration of African Americans.”17 The prediction of black extinction by the year 2000 was developed on the authority of health-based statistical sources (including the eighth U.S. Census) and used to convince “most insurance companies by 1900 that Blacks were uninsurable.”18
Featuring Michele Goodwin, Professor of Law at the University of California at Irvine. Professor Goodwin teaches Biotechnology and the Law, Women and the Rule of Law, Health Law, and the Reproductive Justice Clinic. She is also the Chancellor Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy. This is a clip of her discussing the history of gynecology from the documentary "At Your Cervix", dedicated to making pelvic exams respectful and pain-free.
New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito has been joined by other officials and community members in calling for the removal of the Sims statue in Central Park, East Harlem.
East Harlem Preservation has been actively engaged in protesting the statue for 10 years:
As you may know, we have sponsored numerous public discussions about the presumed accomplishments of Sims, a white southern doctor who experimented on enslaved Black women without anesthesia or informed consent—both in the context of historic preservation as well as honoring and upholding the civil and the reproductive rights of women of color. East Harlem Preservation began its campaign in 2007 in solidarity with similar efforts by activist Viola Plummer—a member of the December 12th Movement and co-founder of the Harriet Tubman-Fannie Lou Hamer Women’s Collective—who had begun calling attention to Sim’s cruel experiments after the publication of Harriet A. Washington’s book “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present” in 2006. We immediately endorsed Ms. Plummer’s campaign because we agreed that the statue was an affront to the predominantly Black and Latino community of East Harlem.
In February 2011, East Harlem Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito wrote a letter asking the Parks Department to remove the statue, which she described as “a constant reminder of the cruelty endured by women of color in our country’s history.”
“I am disturbed that a monument honoring an individual who tortured enslaved women and young Irish immigrants for the advancement of medicine is located in a neighborhood where people of color are the majority,” Mark-Viverito added. “Because this statue is as a constant reminder of the inhumane manner in which his medical practices were perfected, I request that a reevaluation of its current location be conducted. It is my belief that a monument that aligns with the ideals of a community in which the majority is people of color would be more appropriate for our neighborhood.”
This panel discussion covers not only the Sims statue, but the broader issues of reproductive justice for women of color and poor women.
In February 2017 East Harlem Preservation held an in-studio discussion at Manhattan Neighborhood Network's El Barrio Firehouse Community Media Center about ongoing efforts to remove the controversial statue of Dr. J. Marion Sims from its Fifth Avenue location. In addition to examining the presumed accomplishments of Dr. Sims, who experimented on enslaved Black women without anesthesia or informed consent, participants discussed the civil and reproductive rights of women of color. Guests included:
Diane Collier, Chair of Community Board 11;
Lynn Roberts, PhD, Assistant Professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy; and
Harriet A. Washington, author of "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present" (2007)
Harriet Washington’s book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present is a must-read.
From the era of slavery to the present day, the first full history of black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment.
Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions.
NPR broadcasted a report titled “Remembering Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey: The Mothers of Modern Gynecology” back in February
Black patients continue to receive less pain medication for broken bones and cancer. Black children receive less pain medication that white children for appendicitis. One reason for this is that many people inaccurately believe that blacks literally have thicker skin than whites and experience less pain.
The failure to recognize the pain of black patients can be tracked far back in the history of American medicine. Dr. James Marion Sims, a 19th-century physician, has been dubbed the father of modern gynecology. He's honored by three statues across the United States, one of which describes him as treating both empresses and slave women.
This week, we consider what — and whom — this inscription leaves out. Invisible in his shadow are the enslaved women on whom he experimented. Today, they are unknown and unnamed except for three: Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey.
The most comprehensive news coverage I have read around this issue to date is an article titled “J. Marion Sims: ‘Savior of women’ or medical monster?” by The Post and Courier’s Lauren Sausser. It is lengthy but the entire piece is worth reading.
Born near Rock Hill in 1813, Sims is widely recognized as the “Father of Gynecology.” He set up the first women’s hospital in the country, invented an early version of the speculum and pioneered a surgical technique with silver sutures that cured women who suffered from lifelong incontinence caused by difficult childbirth. A bronze bust on the Statehouse grounds in Columbia and another statue in Alabama mark his medical contributions.
But critics have labeled Sims a monster of antebellum medicine for the experiments he carried out on slaves in the 1840s. They argue Sims more closely resembles the Nazi doctors who tortured Jews during World War II than a distinguished American physician. “It was clear he was passionate about trying to improve science, improve care for women,” said Scott Sullivan, the director of maternal-fetal medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. “But he was a racist. There is no question.”
Some more on his experiments on enslaved women:
Nicole Ivy, a historian at the American Alliance of Museums, said Sims tried to downplay the scope of his experimentation on slaves in his memoir by misrepresenting the size and location of his practice. He asked white men around the region to send him their slaves who suffered from vesico-vaginal fistulas, Ivy said. Sims agreed to provide them with food, clothing and shelter, while the slave owners continued to pay property taxes for the women they owned.
During a four-year period in the mid-to-late 1840s, Sims carried out operations on 12 to 17 enslaved women, Ivy said, and he trained some of them to become his surgical assistants. Many of the enslaved women in his operating room became addicted to opium during their captivity, she said, because Sims administered the drug to ease their pain and to slow down their digestive systems. Frequent bowel movements would more likely disrupt their internal stitches.
“Anarcha was there for many years,” Ivy said. “She was the recipient of 30 surgeries, at least. She was one of his earliest patients.”
Last weekend I had the honor to meet and listen to Dorothy Roberts at the Kinks, Locks and Twists Environmental and Reproductive Justice Conference in Philadelphia.
Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also Founding Director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, Roberts has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of race and gender in U.S. institutions and has been a leader in transforming thinking on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. She is the author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon 1997; Twentieth Anniversary Edition, Vintage 2017),
In her presentation she brought up Sims’ experimentation on black enslaved women, placing it into the context of a long history of other abuses, including forced and coerced sterilization of women of color.
Her book Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty is a seminal text for anyone who has an interest in reproductive justice.
The image of the “Welfare Queen” still dominates white America’s perceptions of Black women. It is an image that also continues to shape our government’s policies concerning Black women’s reproductive decisions. Proposed legislation to alleviate poverty focuses on plans to deny benefits to children born to welfare mothers and to require insertion of birth control implants as a condition of receiving aid. Meanwhile a booming fertility industry serves primarily infertile white couples.
In Killing the Black Body, Northwestern University professor Dorothy Roberts exposes America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies, from slave masters’ economic stake in bonded women’s fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor Black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s. These abuses, Roberts argues, point not only to the degradation of Black motherhood but to the exclusion of Black women’s reproductive needs from the feminist agenda.
The history of unethical human experimentation in the United States covers more than just Sims’ abuse of enslaved women. It far too often used people of color, the poor, the mentally ill, inmates, and the elderly as guinea pigs. The U.S. eugenics movement and forced sterilizations, sanctioned by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell, became a model for the Nazis.
As we protest and fight for the removal of statues, let us never forget that they are symbols of horrific human pain and suffering.
As I watched protests taking place across the U.S. rejecting the KKK, white supremacists, and Neo-Nazis, I saw these posts on Twitter:
It’s elating to see young women in my old neighborhood of East Harlem gather together to demand the removal of the Sims statue and discuss the links to our racist history.
On Saturday, August 19, 2017 members of Black Youth Project 100 held a demonstration in front of the statue of J. Marion Sims—a white southern doctor who experimented on enslaved Black women without anesthesia or consent. Dozens of women of color and their allies spoke out, chanted, and sang songs contesting the presence of such symbols of white supremacy in the predominantly Black and Latino community of East Harlem.
I join with them today in shouting out: I believe that we will win.
New York City should remove the Sims statue and replace it with one honoring Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, and the other women who are the true mothers of gynecology.