Statues of medical racist who experimented on slaves should also be taken down
MONDAY, AUG 28, 2017 08:04 PM CDT
Enslaved women with incurable diseases had surgery performed on them and weren't given any anaesthesia
STEPHEN KENNY, THE CONVERSATION
Confederate generals are not the only statues causing public outrage in the US. On Saturday, protesters gathered in New York City’s Central Park to call for the removal of a monument to James Marion Sims — the “father of gynaecology” — a doctor who bought, sold and experimented on slaves.
There are two other Sims statues on state-owned property. One is in Columbia, South Carolina, and the other in Montgomery, Alabama. In an interview with MSNBC, Steve Benjamin, the mayor of Columbia, recently agreed that the local Sims statue should come down “at some point”. Now the New York Academy of Medicine has reissued a statement supporting the removal of Sims’ effigy from Central Park.
Over the past five decades, a small army of academics — including social historians, feminists, African American scholars and bioethicists — have reached a consensus that Sims’ medical research on enslaved patients was dangerous, exploitative and deeply unethical — even by the standards of his times. And doctors at the Medical University of South Carolina, in Sims’ home state, have publicly acknowledged Sims’ overt medical racism.
The ongoing removal of statues that celebrate the Confederacy and other forms of white supremacy, is an opportunity to also correct the problem of Sims’ troubling presence on the symbolic landscape of America’s past.
More:
http://www.salon.com/2017/08/28/statues-of-medical-racist-who-experimented-on-slaves-should-also-be-taken-down_partner/
~ ~ ~
Council Speaker Urged to Remove Statue of Doctor Who Experimented on Slaves
By Jeff Mays | May 7, 2014 7:00am
@JeffCMays
. . .
However, Sims did not use anesthesia on the slave women he used as test subjects, operating on one woman at least 30 times. When Sims operated on white women using the techniques he had practiced on the slaves, those women were anesthetized.
Some have explained Sims' actions by citing the medical ethics of his times.
But Harriet Washington, author of "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present," and the winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, said her research revealed that medical mores of the time did require consent, and that some of Sims' contemporaries objected to his methods.
"He perfected the technique that helped millions of women, but not these women," Washington said.
Parks Department officials said they have no intention to remove the bronze and granite statue, which was dedicated in 1894, and instead are in the process of finalizing language they hope will present a historically accurate picture of Sims, acknowledging three of his known slave subjects.
More:
https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20140507/east-harlem/council-speaker-urged-remove-statue-of-doctor-who-operated-on-slaves
= new reply since forum marked as read
