|
|
 |
Gynecologist’s Statue: Should It Stay or Go?
By Andres Caballero
New America Media
Dec 08, 2010
NEW YORK CITY—The statue of Dr. James
Marion Sims, a surgical pioneer considered the father of modern
gynecology, stands amid fallen autumn leaves in northeast Central Park,
bowing to passersby who look with curiosity, but fail to recognize him.
Sims’s contributions to science and medicine are revered by many, but
reviled by those who know of the pain endured by female slaves on whom
he operated without anesthesia in the mid-1800s: he was trying to find
the cure for a painful post-birth condition known as vesico-vaginal
fistula.
“There is no doubt that he carried out experiments on women, and that he
was only able to do so because they were slaves,” says Deborah McGregor,
a history professor at the University of Illinois and author of From
Midwives to Medicine: The Birth of American Gynecology.
The issue now is whether the city should continue to honor Sims’s
achievements or signal its disapproval of his methods by removing his
statue from its place at Fifth Avenue near 103rd Street, opposite the
New York Academy of Medicine, a historically African-American
neighborhood that is now largely Puerto Rican.
“Should the NYC Parks Department remove the statue of Dr. Marion Sims
from its East Harlem location considering his experiments on female and
infant slaves?” asked a recent poll on EastHarlemPreservation.Org, an
advocacy organization that promotes and preserves the neighborhood’s
cultural, architectural and environmental history.
Of the 650 respondents, 62 percent voted for removal, while 16 percent
wanted to keep the statue in place, and 23 percent said they needed more
information.
A 2007 petition by the office of New York City Councilmember Charles
Barron to remove the statue went nowhere, said Marina Ortiz, president
and founder of East Harlem Preservation. But Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito
has told the group that she is open to advocating for the statue’s
removal.
Meanwhile, a spokesman from the NYC Parks and Recreation department says
there have been no requests to get rid of the statue. Frances Mastrota,
chair of the Community Board 11 Parks and Recreation Committee, says she
did not know about the statue, but added that she would look into
possible requests to have it removed.
Sims was a controversial figure even in his lifetime. Born in South
Carolina in 1813, he attended medical school in his home state and in
Philadelphia, and spent the early part of his career practicing in
Alabama, where he owned slaves. In addition to his pioneering work in
the field of gynecology —among other things -- he invented the speculum,
an instrument that allows doctors to see into the vagina—he boasted of
being the first doctor in the South to successfully treat clubfoot and
cross-eyes.
A major focus of his gynecological work was finding a way to repair
vesico-vaginal fistula, a painful and embarrassing disorder caused by
prolonged labor that results in the complete loss of urinary (and often
fecal) control, as well as other side effects. In Sims’s era, the
condition was “a physical and social calamity,” as one researcher puts
it, and women with the condition were forced to avoid contact with other
people, and were sometimes sent away from their families.
Sims operated on at least 10 slave women from about 1845 to 1849.
Although anesthesia became available in 1846, at least three of the
slaves—Lucy, Anarcha and Betsey — endured surgery without it.
A New York Times article in October 1894 explains how Sims’s “first
operation was on a female slave and was unsuccessful. He operated again
and again on the same subject [Anarcha], and finally, in his thirtieth
trial, he was successful.”
In his autobiography, Sims wrote about Lucy: “The poor girl, on her
knees, bore the operation with great heroism and bravery. Lucy's agony
was extreme.”
After perfecting his technique and repairing the fistulas successfully
in Anarcha. Sims then repaired those of several other slave women. Only
after these surgeries proved successful did he try the procedure on his
white female paients, this time with anesthesia. (According to McGregor
and others, Sims also operated on infants born to slaves).
Sims moved to New York in 1853, becoming famous over the next few
decades for a number of advances in the treatment of female patients.
During the Civil War, he traveled to London and Paris, where his
patients included Empress Eugenie. He was named president of the
American Medical Association in 1875 and the Gynecological Society in
1879. He died in New York in 1883.
Sims’s bronze and granite statue, designed by German sculptor Ferdinand
von Miller II, was first erected in Bryant Park, near the New York
Public Library in midtown Manhattan, in 1892, and moved to East Harlem
in 1934. A placard on the monument reads: “Surgeon and philanthropist,
founder of the Woman’s Hospital State of New York. In recognition of his
services in the cause of science and mankind.”
The current backlash against Sims has its roots in the women’s movement
of the mid-1970s. But Sims also has his defenders, including L. Lewis
Wall, a doctor and professor at Washington University School of Medicine
in St. Louis. “Sims's modern critics have discounted the enormous
suffering experienced by fistula victims, Wall wrote in a 2005 article
in the Journal of Medical Ethics, adding that Sims’s failure to use
anesthesia on his black patients in the 1840s was not necessarily
racist:
“Acceptance [of anesthesia among doctors at the time] was not universal,
and there was considerable opposition to its introduction from many
different quarters, for many different reasons.”
Walls noted: “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.”
“I think it’s important to add that he did help some of the women by
creating a working treatment for a miserable condition,” agrees
McGregor, the history professor. Still, she adds, “I sympathize with the
desire to remove the statue. Perhaps the best compromise is to make a
statue honoring Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy.”
But Ortiz, of East Harlem Preservation, believes the Sims statue should
go.
“I don’t think that the average Puerto Rican in East Harlem would find
this statue representative of their community,” she says, adding.
“Building a statue of the three [slave] women won’t solve the issue.”
Andres Caballero is currently an
MS student at Columbia School of Journalism. |
