The first patient to endure James Marion Sims’ experimental surgery in 1845 was named Lucy. Lucy, an enslaved black woman in Alabama, remained on her hands and knees on top of a table for more than an hour as Sims sought to repair a hole between her bladder and vagina without giving her any anesthesia, which was not widely used then.
Lucy quickly developed blood poisoning after Sims tried to fashion a catheter out of a piece of sponge, which Sims later admitted was “stupid” of him.
“Lucy’s agony was extreme,” Sims wrote in his 1884 autobiography. “I thought that she was going to die.”
But Lucy didn’t die. She, and at least six other enslaved women, endured four years of experimental surgeries before Sims finally perfected the procedure, seeking to cure what’s called a vesico-vaginal fistula. His success earned him the moniker “father of modern gynecology.”
But as the years went by that success was overshadowed by the fact that he earned it on the backs of slaves.
That’s the reason his statue in Central Park was removed on Tuesday — 124 years after it was erected.
New York City’s Public Design Commission voted unanimously on Monday to get rid of it. Crews arrived on Tuesday morning with a forklift to take it from its pedestal as onlookers cheered, “Marion Sims is not our hero.” The bronze statue will be relocated to a Brooklyn cemetery, where Sims is buried.
The Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers has pledged to include a plaque next to the statue that explains Sims’ “legacy of non-consensual medical experimentation on women of color broadly and Black women specifically that Sims has come to symbolize.”
To “honor the sacrifice of the women whose bodies were used in the name of scientific advancement,” the plaque also will include the names of the women who endured Sims’ experiments: Lucy, Anarcha and Betsey.