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Statue of a doctor who experimented on enslaved women still stands. There's now monument to victims.
Entertainment
The statue of a doctor who experimented on enslaved women still stands in Alabama. But now there’s also a monument to his victims.
By Linda Matchan
October 2, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Michelle Browder is a Black artist and activist who runs a civil rights tour company called More Than Tours — so named, she says, because "it's an experience." ... A sobering experience: stops include historical lynching sites, the city’s former slave market and the old Greyhound Bus Station where 21 young Freedom Riders were viciously beaten by an angry mob in 1961.
Still, no historic site on the tour riles Browder as much as a statue on the lawn of the Alabama State House. Not the one honoring Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy and defender of slavery. It’s the one across the lawn, commemorating a 19th-century physician most people have never heard of: J. Marion Sims, the so-called “father of modern gynecology.”
{snip}
In the mid-1840s, Sims performed torturous experimental surgeries on approximately 10 enslaved young Black women, without anesthesia or their consent. (He sought consent from their owners.) An enslaver himself, Sims was credited with curing a distressing and humiliating complication of childbirth known as “vesicovaginal fistula” — a hole between the bladder and vagina — and developing other gynecological procedures and tools, including a type of speculum.
In recent years his legacy has been scrutinized by scholars and debunked. They’ve noted that the type of speculum he claimed to invent had long been in use by others and that some of procedures he utilized were not really his, or were dangerous. Many have also decried the racism and sexism inherent in Black women being used as guinea pigs.
{snip}
Browder’s response to the Sims statue is a commanding counter-monument called “The Mothers of Gynecology” that immortalizes three of the women — known as Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey — who went under Sims’s knife in a ramshackle structure he grandiosely called the “Negro Hospital.” It was there, behind the brick building where he took care of White women, that he performed 30 surgeries on Anarcha alone.
{snip}
The statue of a doctor who experimented on enslaved women still stands in Alabama. But now there’s also a monument to his victims.
By Linda Matchan
October 2, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Michelle Browder is a Black artist and activist who runs a civil rights tour company called More Than Tours — so named, she says, because "it's an experience." ... A sobering experience: stops include historical lynching sites, the city’s former slave market and the old Greyhound Bus Station where 21 young Freedom Riders were viciously beaten by an angry mob in 1961.
Still, no historic site on the tour riles Browder as much as a statue on the lawn of the Alabama State House. Not the one honoring Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy and defender of slavery. It’s the one across the lawn, commemorating a 19th-century physician most people have never heard of: J. Marion Sims, the so-called “father of modern gynecology.”
{snip}
In the mid-1840s, Sims performed torturous experimental surgeries on approximately 10 enslaved young Black women, without anesthesia or their consent. (He sought consent from their owners.) An enslaver himself, Sims was credited with curing a distressing and humiliating complication of childbirth known as “vesicovaginal fistula” — a hole between the bladder and vagina — and developing other gynecological procedures and tools, including a type of speculum.
In recent years his legacy has been scrutinized by scholars and debunked. They’ve noted that the type of speculum he claimed to invent had long been in use by others and that some of procedures he utilized were not really his, or were dangerous. Many have also decried the racism and sexism inherent in Black women being used as guinea pigs.
{snip}
Browder’s response to the Sims statue is a commanding counter-monument called “The Mothers of Gynecology” that immortalizes three of the women — known as Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey — who went under Sims’s knife in a ramshackle structure he grandiosely called the “Negro Hospital.” It was there, behind the brick building where he took care of White women, that he performed 30 surgeries on Anarcha alone.
{snip}
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