A 2011 study found that they continued to celebrate Sims’s achievement, often uncritically. Medical textbooks, however, were slow to mention the controversy over Sims’s legacy. 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. Over the next few decades, scholars continued to criticize Sims’s practice of experimenting on enslaved women. This did not quell criticisms, of course. “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.” “Women with fistulas became social outcasts,” Kaiser said. The condition can be embarrassing, as women with it are unable to control urination. 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 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. Marion Sims.Īnother doctor, Irwin Kaiser, in a more tempered defense asked the audience to consider how Sims ultimately helped the enslaved women he experimented upon. 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. Hester Jr., who said, “I rise not to reappraise J. In response, during the 1978 annual meeting of the American Gynecological Society, doctors took turns vigorously defending Sims against Barker-Benfield’s book. 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. Barker-Benfield juxtaposed Sims’s “extremely active, adventurous policy of surgical interference with woman’s sexual organs” with his considerable ambition and self-interest. Barker-Benfield titled The Horrors of the Half-Known. The first serious challenge to Sims’s lionization came in a 1976 book by the historian G.J. To implicate him, his defenders implied, is to implicate medicine in mid-19th century America. Medical professionals, especially gynecologists, have not always taken kindly to criticism from outsiders. The move came after decades of concerted effort by historians, scholars, and activists to reexamine Sims’s legacy. And on Tuesday morning, in the face of growing controversy, New York City moved a statue honoring him out of Central Park. 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. He also invented the modern speculum, and the Sims’s position for vaginal exams, both of which he first used on these women. He performed 30 surgeries on Anarcha alone, all without anesthesia, as it was not yet widespread. 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. The man whose name appears in medical textbooks, whose likeness is memorialized in statues, is J. There were other women, but their identities have been forgotten. Their names-at least the ones we know-were Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey.
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