Controversial doctor’s statue leaving Central Park
Over the years, few pedestrians walking along Central Park past Fifth Ave. at E. 103rd St. gave more than a passing glance at the statue of James Marion Sims, a white 19th century doctor. Recently, however, the granite monument commemorating Sims brought a wave of controversy – and activists demanding it be removed.
Those interested in seeing the statue will soon have to journey to the GreenWood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where the doctor is buried. A special commission on monuments, impaneled by Mayor de Blasio, recently voted to relocate the statue, proposing that an informational plaque be installed on the pedestal citing the controversial issues surrounding Sims.
At the crux of the issues were charges that Sims, the so-called father of gynecology, performed surgical experiments on enslaved black women – as part of his research – without using anesthesia on the subjects. Last summer, the protests intensified when the statue was defaced with splotches of red paint and vandalized — the word “racist” scrawled across it.
Joining the outrage was City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who described Sims’ work as “repugnant and reprehensible … and a stain on our nation’s history.”
De Blasio voiced his concern with a call for a 90-day review of city property bedecked with “symbols of hate.”
Several black women were among the protesters last summer wearing smocks smeared in red symbolizing the blood-stained garments of the enslaved women.
New York City is just one of two cities where a statue of Sims has aroused a demand for removal. In Columbia, S.C., the state where he was born, his statue stands on the Capitol grounds. And Steve Benjamin, the city’s first AfricanAmerican mayor, is among those offended by the statue’s presence.
Another statue of Sims is prominent on the Capitol grounds in Montgomery, Ala., and a painting depicting Sims and other white men hovering over a halfnaked black patient was removed from the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Center for Advanced Medical Studies after a series of complaints.
It was in Alabama, from 1835 to 1849, that Sims practiced medicine and began inventing a number of significant instruments still in use today, including the speculum – an instrument used to dilate an orifice or canal in the body to allow inspection.
Before moving to New York City, he had already begun a variety of treatments that would revolutionize gynecology.
But his detractors believe he ventured too far with what they called his use of black women as guinea pigs in his experiments without their consent – and without anesthesia, which was gradually being introduced to reduce pain during surgery.
In 1855, Sims established the first women’s hospital in New York City. His statue was dedicated in 1894 at Bryant Park before being placed on the periphery of Central Park.
Although the demonstrations to remove the Sims statue received fresh urgency, the activism here is nothing new and has sporadically occurred since 2010, mainly led by the East Harlem Preservation organization.
Members say their campaign was inspired by the earlier efforts of activist Viola Plummer, who learned of Sims’ experiments after reading Harriet A. Washington’s book “Medical Apartheid — The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.”
Washington wrote that Sims “bought black women slaves and addicted them to morphine in order to perform dozens of exquisitely painful, distressingly intimate vaginal surgeries.” It was only after these excruciating experiments that the results were then helpful in his operations on white women, many of whom he etherized and rendered unconscious.
In Washington’s book, she devotes considerable attention to the Tuskegee experiments, a clinical study in which the painful and debilitating effects of untreated syphilis was observed in AfricanAmerican men.
Begun almost a century after Sims’ experiments, the Tuskegee study started in 1932 and ended in 1972.