James Marion sims
Ironically known as the 'Father of gynecology, Dr. James Marion Sims was appointed to take medical care of the salves working for southern plantation owners. unlike any other doctors, Sims used the slaves to testify his surgical skills by preforming experimental surgeries on black woman. Sims used his inhumane activities on enslaved woman as means to reach his goal of revolutionizing the field of gynecology.
In His autobiography account, James documents that he had preformed several surgical exterminations on enslaved victims, including Betsey, Lucy, and Anarcha. In negotiation letter he proposed to the plantation owners regarding their slaves, Sims wrote, “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 described Lucy as an 18 years old with two children, after giving birth to her last child, “she had been unable to hold any water”, Sims wrote. While preforming his medical experimentation on Lucy, her bladder was damaged, “leaving an opening between the vagina and the bladder, at least two inches in diameter or more,”
Recently, a protest was held in front of Sims statue in Central Park, New York (located at the corner of Fifth Ave and East 103rd St). The protesters have demanded the removal of Sims momentum – a man, they believe, who exploited the institution of racism for his own gain.
In a Facebook post shared by The Black Youth project, one of many social justice activist groups that participated in the protests, they exposed that Sims had ” “purchased Black women slaves and used them as guinea pigs for his untested surgical experiments. He repeatedly performed genital surgery on Black women WITHOUT ANESTHESIA because according to him, ‘Black women don’t feel pain.’ Despite his inhumane tests on Black women, Sims was named ‘the father of modern gynecology’, and his statue currently stands right outside of the New York Academy of Medicine. #FightSupremacy.”
On April 17, 2018, Sims’ statue was removed. It will be replaced with statues of the three enslaved woman he used as trial, namely; Betsey, Lucy, and Anarcha.
