History Is a Tangled Mess: Medical Progress, But at What Cost?

This year’s events¹ have caused us to revisit and reevaluate our nation’s checkered history. Profoundly important and deeply fundamental issues such as the right to free speech while not inciting violence are front and center in contemporary headlines. The seminal events highlighting these issues took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11–12, 2017, and began as a protest of the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from its location in a park. Similar controversies regarding other statues honoring Confederate soldiers followed. This controversy reminded us all that the evil of slavery is one of the main reasons the United States fought the Civil War. It logically follows that the heroes of the Confederacy were, at least tacitly, proponents of slavery and should not be glorified in our current society. The controversial issue of removing statues celebrating Confederate Civil War heroes has spread throughout the nation and as far north as New York City. It now has touched medicine.

A large statue stands at 5th Avenue and 103rd Street in Manhattan, New York, dedicated to Dr. J. Marion Sims.² Similar statues exist in Columbia, South Carolina, and Mobile, Alabama. Sims (1813–1883) is considered by many to be father of the field of modern gynecology, helping to give this field gravitas and create it as a separate specialty. But controversy exists regarding his history and legacy because it is clear that his many accomplishments came about as the result of experimental surgery performed on enslaved black women—without their consent and without anesthesia.^3–5 This information has given rise to protests in Manhattan to have his statue removed from its current neighborhood (but not destroyed), where some consider it offensive.⁶ In this editorial, we explore the challenging and provocative question of how we, in historical retrospect, judge the medical contributions of Sims.
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