Random Complicated History Of "Father Of Gynecology" J. Marion Sims (11 items)

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  (#11) Placing Sims In Context Means Rethinking Monuments Honoring Him

  Some argue Sims has to be understood as a man of his time, but his legacy is also part of a long, troubling one of abusing Black people as medical test subjects. By operating on Black women without their consent, Sims placed himself in the company of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. And as with other complicated figures, we can both recognize Sims's medical advances while honoring the women who had an important role in those experiments.

  In April 2018 New York City removed a Central Park statue honoring J. Marion Sims. Manhattan's Deputy Borough President Matthew S. Washington concluded, "To hail Sims as a hero was inappropriate and out of bounds." Instead, the statue will be relocated to the cemetery where Sims is buried, where a sign will put Sims's work in context.
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  (#3) Lucy, Betsey, and Anarcha, Sims's Three Recorded Slave Patients, Endured A Great Deal Of Pain Many Benefit From Today

  Sims operated on many enslaved women, but we only know three of their names: Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey. Records state that during an hourlong operation without anesthesia, 18-year-old Lucy screamed and cried out in pain. Sims first experimented with a speculum on Betsey, using the bent handle of a spoon to examine her.

  And Anarcha was just 17 years old when Sims first operated on her; she underwent a total of 30 operations, all without painkillers, over a four-year period. Sims was also experimenting with closing surgical cuts after his procedures. It took 30 operations on Anarcha before he perfected the technique. For years, Sims gave heavy doses of opium to his patients after surgery, with the goal of inducing constipation while their stitches healed.
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  (#7) Defenders Claim Sims's Advances Were Worth The Ethical Problems

  Was Sims simply a man of his time? As Sarah Zhang wrote for The Atlantic, "To implicate [Sims], his defenders implied, is to implicate medicine in mid-19th century America." It was common practice not to use anesthesia, after all, and medical ethics was barely in its infancy.

  Sims's more virulent defenders claim the medical advances he pioneered justify his ethical violations. Some even suggest Sims's patients, slave women with fistulas, would have consented to the experiments to cure their medical problems, even if their consent was not legally required at the time. However, the logic underlying such a suggestion - that we can look backward and know what individuals would have said or done had their circumstances been different, without explicit statements from those individuals - is inherently fallacious.
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  (#5) For A Long Time, The Medical Profession Praised Sims, Even While Acknowledging The Issues With His Work

  For decades, the medical profession praised Sims for his groundbreaking research, even while acknowledging the ethical problems with the way he conducted that research. As Dr. Tatiana M. Gellein found in her research, the first critiques of Sims's work did not emerge until the civil rights movement.

  Even in 1978, the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology published an article that concluded, "[Sims's] original three subjects might never have tolerated the pain and misery of the repeated operations had they not been slaves. In the long run, they had reason to be grateful to Sims."
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  (#2) In His Writing, Sims Documented The Pain He Caused His Slave Patients

  While Sims has been memorialized with numerous statues, his descriptions of medical experiments on slave women, performed without anesthesia, are difficult to read. In his first surgical case, Sims operated on a young slave named Lucy. He wrote:

  That was before the days of anesthetics, and the poor girl [Lucy], on her knees, bore the operation with great heroism and bravery. I had about a dozen doctors there to witness the series of experiments I expected to perform... At the end of five days [Lucy] was very ill. She had fever, frequent pulse, and real blood-poisoning, but we did not know what to call it at that day and time.

  During the operation, Sims intentionally left a sponge in Lucy's bladder, but it became dangerously infected. Sims recalled, "Lucy's agony was extreme... I thought she was going to die."
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  (#10) Sims Also Experimented On Slave Children Based On The Dominant Racist Beliefs Of His Era

  In addition to his surgical experiments on Black women, Sims also tested his methods on enslaved Black children. But his attempts to cure neonatal tetanus were unsuccessful. As part of his experimental treatments, Sims used shoemaker's tools to "loosen" the bones in Black children's skulls, based on the belief that Black people were less intelligent than white people because their skulls were too tight.

  While Sims may have pioneered important medical techniques, he did so by abusing Black bodies with the conviction that they were inferior to white patients. However, his views were within the mainstream for 19th-century medical science.

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