james marion sims experiments

Skip to main content
Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

The Two-Way

'father of gynecology,' who experimented on slaves, no longer on pedestal in nyc.

Camila Domonoske

A statue of surgeon J. Marion Sims is taken down from its pedestal in Central Park on Tuesday. A New York City panel decided to move the controversial statue after outcry, because many of Sims' medical breakthroughs came from experimenting on enslaved black women without anesthesia. Spencer Platt/Getty Images hide caption

Updated at 10:30 a.m. ET Wednesday

New York City has removed a statue of J. Marion Sims, a 19th-century gynecologist who experimented on enslaved women, from a pedestal in Central Park.

The statue will be moved to a cemetery in Brooklyn where Sims, sometimes called the "father of gynecology," is buried. A new informational plaque will be added both to the empty pedestal and the relocated statue, and the city is commissioning new artwork to reflect the issues raised by Sims' legacy.

The 1890s statue was installed across the street from the New York Academy of Medicine in 1934, with a plaque praising Sims' "brilliant achievement." Sims perfected a technique to repair fistulas, which are holes between the vagina and the bladder or rectum and can lead to incontinence, by repeatedly conducting painful experimental surgeries on enslaved black women without using anesthesia.

Hidden Brain

Remembering anarcha, lucy, and betsey: the mothers of modern gynecology.

In January, a mayoral commission examining controversial monuments in New York City overwhelmingly recommended that the Sims statue be relocated. Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed .

The Public Design Commission approved the decision unanimously on Monday , and less than a day later, the statue came down.

A small crowd watched and cheered, New York Daily News reports , with one spectator calling out, "Off with his head!"

Harlem resident Mercy Wellington spoke to the Daily News about watching the statue come down.

"I feel that my ancestors can rest," she told the newspaper.

"Each day I walked past that statue and I saw him up there, I felt personally disrespected. ... It's a historical moment for me, and it's an emotional moment. I just feel the right thing is being done."

A woman stands beside the empty pedestal where a statue of J. Marion Sims used to stand. Multiple groups demanded the removal of the statue, which sat on a pedestal praising his achievements as "brilliant" without acknowledging the women who endured his painful experiments. Spencer Platt/Getty Images hide caption

Vanessa Northington Gamble, a physician and medical historian at George Washington University, spoke to NPR's Hidden Brain podcast in 2016 for an episode about Sims' legacy.

She explained that in the 1840s, to develop a treatment for fistulas, Sims spent years experimenting on enslaved women. He conducted surgeries on a number of women, but we only know the names of three of them: Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey.

"These women were property," Gamble says. "These women could not consent. These women also had value to the slaveholders for production and reproduction — how much work they could do in the field, how many enslaved children they could produce. And by having these fistulas, they could not continue with childbirth and also have difficulty working."

In his autobiography, Sims describes negotiating with slaveowners: "I made this proposition to the owners of the 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." He also complains about the expense of feeding them.

In addition to Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy, Sims writes, "I got three or four more to experiment on, and there was never a time that I could not, at any day, have had a subject for operation. But my operations all failed ... this went on, not for one year, but for two and three, and even four years."

The surgeries, which were repeated again and again on the same women — 30 times on Anarcha — were painful. Sims wrote in his autobiography of the results of one "stupid thing" he tested: "Lucy's agony was extreme. She was much prostrated, and I thought that she was going to die. ... After she had recovered entirely from the effects of this unfortunate experiment, I put her on a table, to examine."

Sims also says the women wanted the surgeries because they wanted to be cured. As Gamble notes, we only have his word for that. And the New York City commission writes: "Free consent to participate in the experiments was not obtainable from women who were not free."

Modern critics of Sims also note that he conducted these experiments without anesthesia, although the commission does not focus on this element of his research. His research began during the early days of modern anesthesia , as his defenders have noted. After perfecting the technique on black women, without anesthesia, Sims went on to offer it to white women. "But he treated white women with anesthesia," Gamble notes.

(Sims' own statements on this are mixed. Years after his initial tests, he said he still didn't believe in using anesthesia for fistula surgeries because "they are not painful enough to justify the trouble and risk." But he also said the experimental surgeries on his enslaved subjects were "so painful, that none but a woman could have borne them," and in his autobiography, he describes conducting fistula operations in Europe on wealthy women who were sedated.)

Lost Mothers: Maternal Mortality In The U.S.

Black mothers keep dying after giving birth. shalon irving's story explains why.

This 19th-century history is echoed in contemporary medical practice, Hidden Brain notes: "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 ."

And, in America today, black women are far more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth than white women are.

Poet Bettina Judd drew on her own experience, as a black woman who saw doctors dismiss her pain as she endured an agonizing ovarian torsion, as she reflected on the experiences of Lucy, Betsey and Anarcha.

She shared several poems with Hidden Brain , including "Betsey Invents the Speculum" :

"Introducing the bent handle of the spoon I saw everything, as no man had ever seen before" — from The Story of My Life by J. Marion Sims

I have bent in other ways to open the body make space ... Sims invents the speculum I invent the wincing the if you must of it the looking away the here of discovery.

The statue, shown being driven away in a Parks Department truck on Tuesday, will be relocated in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Sims is buried. Spencer Platt/Getty Images hide caption

The statue, shown being driven away in a Parks Department truck on Tuesday, will be relocated in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Sims is buried.

The "distressing imbalance in power" between Sims and the enslaved women played a key role in the New York City mayoral commission's recommendation to remove the statue.

The group considered more than 800 other monuments, statues and markers; the Sims is the only one it overwhelmingly advised relocating.

The commission laid out its reasoning in a lengthy report . It emphasized that a reckoning with history means not just removing controversial statues, but also adding "representation of overlooked histories." In some cases, monuments could be improved by "re-contextualization" to provide more information about the historical figure depicted.

But in the case of the Sims statue, the commission overwhelmingly urged taking it down from its literal pedestal — and commissioning another type of monument, such as one dedicated to women of color in science and medicine.

Code Switch

What our monuments (don't) teach us about remembering the past.

"There is no question about the abuse of the women he experimented on," the commission wrote. And yet, in the statue's pose and the adulatory prose on its plaque, "there is no ambiguity to the monument's glorification."

In addition, "the surrounding neighborhood of East Harlem/El Barrio largely consists of communities of color" that have been asking that the statue be taken down for decades, the commission noted.

In addition to the monument in New York, Sims is memorialized with statues in South Carolina and in Montgomery, Ala.

central park
black women
New York City
19th century

Death Penalty
Children in Adult Prison
Wrongful Convictions
Excessive Punishment
Prison Conditions
Legacy of Slavery
Racial Terror Lynching
Racial Segregation
Presumption of Guilt
Community Remembrance Project
Hunger Relief
Unjust Fees and Fines
Health Care
True Justice Documentary
A History of Racial Injustice Calendar
Donation Questions

124 results for "Prison"

Medical Exploitation of Black Women

In the 1840s, James Marion Sims, a white doctor in Montgomery, Alabama, performed painful experiments without anesthesia on Lucy, an enslaved Black woman, while other doctors observed.

Sims was lauded as the “Father of Gynecology” after his experiments on at least seven enslaved Black women and girls in Montgomery between 1845 and 1849 helped him develop a technique to repair a chronic complication of childbirth. Though the potentially life threatening experiments caused excruciating pain, Sims legally needed permission only from the enslaved women’s “owners.”

Sims’s experiments on Lucy were unsuccessful and nearly killed her with severe blood poisoning. He nonetheless continued to perform procedures on enslaved women, sometimes drugging them so they could not resist. Sims subjected Anarcha, an enslaved teenager, to at least 13 operations without anesthesia before he developed a repair technique that was deemed safe to attempt on white patients.

Unable to refuse treatment or withhold consent, Lucy, Anarcha, and Sims’s other enslaved patients were powerless to protect themselves from medical exploitation. During and after enslavement, physicians often denied Black people basic dignity and personhood through mistreatment that reflected the prevailing and dehumanizing myth that Black people were less sensitive to pain than white people.

Sims was celebrated for his medical achievements; his statue remains on the Alabama State Capitol grounds today. But increasingly, his brutal mistreatment of Black women is informing a broader understanding of his legacy as an especially cruel chapter in our history of racial injustice. In April 2018, a statue of Sims was removed from New York City’s Central Park.

Related Resources

A History of Racial Injustice Online Calendar

More essays from A History of Racial Injustice

A History of Racial Injustice

Recent News

Overall Support for the Death Penalty Falls to Five-Decade Low

Fifth Homicide in Seven Months at Alabama Prison

Alabama Executes Carey Grayson

EJI Legacy Gallery Features New Commission from Legendary Artist Betye Saar

The Surgeon Who Experimented on Slaves

Fellow doctors have been some of the most prominent defenders of J. Marion Sims, the controversial “father of gynecology.”

Their names—at least the ones we know—were Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey. There were other women, but their identities have been forgotten.

The man whose name appears in medical textbooks, whose likeness is memorialized in statues, is J. Marion Sims. Celebrated as the “father of modern gynecology,” Sims practiced the surgical techniques that made him famous on enslaved women: Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, and the unknown others. He performed 30 surgeries on Anarcha alone, all without anesthesia, as it was not yet widespread. He also invented the modern speculum , and the Sims’s position for vaginal exams, both of which he first used on these women.

That Sims achieved all this has long won him acclaim; how he achieved all this—by experimenting on enslaved women—started being included in his story much more recently. And on Tuesday morning, in the face of growing controversy, New York City moved a statue honoring him out of Central Park .

The move came after decades of concerted effort by historians, scholars, and activists to reexamine Sims’s legacy. Medical professionals, especially gynecologists, have not always taken kindly to criticism from outsiders. Sims was one of their own. To implicate him, his defenders implied, is to implicate medicine in mid-19th century America.

The first serious challenge to Sims’s lionization came in a 1976 book by the historian G.J. Barker-Benfield titled The Horrors of the Half-Known . Barker-Benfield juxtaposed Sims’s “extremely active, adventurous policy of surgical interference with woman’s sexual organs” with his considerable ambition and self-interest. The man who once admitted “if there was anything I hated, it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis,” took to gynecology with a “monomania” once he realized it was his ticket to fame and fortune, writes Barker-Benfield.

In response, during the 1978 annual meeting of the American Gynecological Society, doctors took turns vigorously defending Sims against Barker-Benfield’s book. The most fervent of them was Lawrence I. Hester Jr., who said, “I rise not to reappraise J. Marion Sims, but to praise him.” He then announced that his institution, the Medical University of South Carolina, which Sims also attended, was raising $750,000 for an endowed chair named after J. Marion Sims.

Another doctor, Irwin Kaiser, in a more tempered defense asked the audience to consider how Sims ultimately helped the enslaved women he experimented upon. The surgery that he practiced on Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, and the other enslaved women was to repair a vesicovaginal fistula—a devastating complication of prolonged labor. When a baby’s head presses for too long in the birth canal, tissue can die from lack of blood, forming a hole between the vagina and the bladder. The condition can be embarrassing, as women with it are unable to control urination. “Women with fistulas became social outcasts,” Kaiser said. “In the long run, they had reasons to be grateful that Sims had cured them of urinary leakage.” He concluded that Sims was “a product of his era.”

This did not quell criticisms, of course. Over the next few decades, scholars continued to criticize Sims’s practice of experimenting on enslaved women . The story became well-known enough to join a list of commonly cited examples—along with the Tuskegee experiments and Henrietta Lacks—of how the American medical system has exploited African Americans.

Medical textbooks, however, were slow to mention the controversy over Sims’s legacy. A 2011 study found that they continued to celebrate Sims’s achievement, often uncritically. “In contrast to the vigorous debate of Sims’s legacy in historical texts and even in the popular press, medical textbooks and journals have largely remained static in their portrayal of Sims as surgical innovator,” the authors wrote.

In recent years, one of the most prominent defenders of Sims’s legacy has been Lewis Wall, a surgeon and an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Wall has traveled to Africa to perform the vesicovaginal fistula surgery that Sims pioneered, and he has seen firsthand what a difference it makes in women’s lives. “Sims’s modern critics have discounted the enormous suffering experienced by fistula victims,” he wrote in a 2006 paper . “The evidence suggests that Sims’s original patients were willing participants in his surgical attempts to cure their affliction—a condition for which no other viable therapy existed at that time.” Wall also defended Sims on the charge that he refused to give anesthesia only to black patients. Anesthesia was not yet widespread in 1845, and physicians who trained without anesthesia sometimes preferred their patients to be awake.

There is debate over whether Sims’s specific surgical practices were unusually gruesome for his time. But his practice of operating on enslaved women was certainly not unusual. He wrote about it openly. It is this ordinariness that is noteworthy.

Why a Statue of the 'Father of Gynecology' Had to Come Down

A woman with a cane walks past the J Marion Sims statue in New York's Central Park.

Nature 's Disastrous ‘Whitewashing’ Editorial

Why No One Can Design a Better Speculum

Sims was able to advance so quickly, argues Deirdre Cooper Owens, a historian at Queens College, City University of New York, in her book, Medical Bondage , because he had access to bodies—first enslaved women in the South, and later also poor Irish women when he moved to New York. “These institutions that existed in this country, which allowed easy access to enslaved women’s bodies [and] poor women’s bodies, allowed certain branches of professional medicine to advance and grow and to also become legitimate,” she says. The history of medicine has often been written as the history of great men . Owens wants to the turn the focus from the doctors hailed as heroes to the forgotten patients.

This first part—taking the focus away from Sims—is happening. In 2006, the University of Alabama at Birmingham removed a painting that depicted Sims as one of the “Medical Giants of Alabama.” In February, the Medical University of South Carolina quietly renamed the endowed chair honoring J. Marion Sims—the one announced by Hester after the publication of The Horrors of the Half-Known . The minutes of the board of trustees meeting where it happened did not even mention Sims’s name—just the new name of the endowed chair. “The decision was made in recognition of the controversial and polarizing nature of this historical figure despite his contributions to the medical field,” an MUSC spokesperson confirmed in an email to The Atlantic .

The J. Marion Sims statue that stood in Central Park is being relocated to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Sims is buried. There, The New York Times reports , the statue will be demoted to a lower pedestal and displayed with a sign explaining the statue’s history. There may be an opportunity, now, to use the statue to tell the full story—to tell the stories of Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, and the other enslaved women and their place in the history of medicine.

About the Author

The medical ethics of the 'father of gynaecology', Dr J Marion Sims.

Author information
Copyright and License information

Vesico-vaginal fistula (VVF) was a common ailment among American women in the 19th century. Prior to that time, no successful surgery had been developed for the cure of this condition until Dr J Marion Sims perfected a successful surgical technique in 1849. Dr Sims used female slaves as research subjects over a four-year period of experimentation (1845-1849). This paper discusses the controversy surrounding his use of powerless women and whether his actions were acceptable during that historical period.

Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

Kaiser I. H. Reappraisals of J. Marion Sims. Am J Obstet Gynecol. 1978 Dec 15;132(8):878–884. doi: 10.1016/0002-9378(78)90715-9. [ DOI ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
View on publisher site
PDF (536.7 KB)
Collections

Add to Collections

IMAGES

J. Marion Sims: The 'Father Of Gynecology' Who Experimented On Slaves
J. Marion Sims: The 'Father of Modern Gynecology' performed shocking
Statue of Alabama gynecologist who experimented on slaves could be
Remembering Anarcha
J. Marion Sims: The 'Father Of Gynecology' Who Experimented On Slaves
J. Marion Sims: The ‘Father Of Modern Gynecology’ Performed Shocking

VIDEO

James Tour on Professor Dave's Answers, Origin of Life Challenge, the Art of Yelling, and more!
James Marion Sims: medical innovator or perpetrator of unethical experimentation?
Uncovering James Marion Sims: The Dark Legacy of Medical Exploitation #shorts
Expériences gynécologiques sur les femmes Noires de James Marion Sims