New York – Critics want New York City to remove a statue in Central Park that honors a doctor who used slaves in developing a pioneering approach to treating physical problems women can develop after childbirth.
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The call to remove the statue of Dr. J. Marion Sims has gotten louder and gained urgency in the wake of violence that followed recent a white nationalist rally in Virginia over the removal of a Confederate statue and sparked national discussions about what should be displayed and honored in the public square.
Sims was a 19th-century physician who is credited with developing a surgical technique to repair certain types of fistulas, or tears, which prior to that had been a seemingly insurmountable condition. He developed the technique through operations on enslaved black women in Alabama, without anesthetic.
Among those calling for the statue to be removed from its upper Manhattan location is City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who at a press conference Monday said, “We must send a definitive message that the despicable acts of J. Marion Sims are repugnant and reprehensible.”
The white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was over the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. A counterdemonstrator was killed when a car drove into a crowd protesting the rally.
Following that violence, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said a task force would be put together to review “symbols of hate” on city property with an eye toward determining whether removals are necessary.
Mark-Viverito also suggested that a statue of Christopher Columbus in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle be evaluated by that task force, based on his treatment of indigenous peoples.
They are describing him as an American Mengele, of course they should take down the statue, they should make a public celebratory event of desecrating it and destroying it.
How’s about removing every monument ,street name ect with the name FDR ….learn a little bit history .
I suppose the statue should come down. This man also save tens of thousands of women from death during childbirth.
Why oh why has this problem of statues that grace our public parks just now become an issue. When OBAMA was president there was not a smidgen of a problem . Only now when trump is the president has it become an issue.Kinda makes you think that there’s more to this than statues.
Americans lived so many years with these statues and little extremism. Today they have extremism so they don’t want the statues.
What came first? Extremism or the statues?
What is worse: Extremism or the statues?
I would rather have the statues that no one really paid attention to and not have the terrible extremism that seems to have penetrated into America.
Next will be to take George Washington off the one dollar bill; since he had slaves?
This entire idea is bizarre. The statues do not move, cannot harm anyone (unless they would fall over onto an unwitting victim), and most people have no idea about who the individual was. Suddenly, the media finds some dirt on the poor dead guy, and there is a federal case. Crazy.
This is getting more and more weird. Start with the facts. These were not healthy women he experimented on. These were women already suffering from a medical condition before he ever met them. His so called experimentation was finding a way to cure them (and all women) suffering from the same condition. In fact, he succeeded in curing some of them. The total number of Black slaves involved – 12. The length of treatment before cured – from 1845 to 1849.
The conditions under which he worked were not significantly different than those any white woman would receive. While anesthesia was then known about, it was something he was not familiar with using (even on White people, and he did not become familiar with it until much later). He did supply opium, which was then the accepted pain-killer, after surgery.
Louis Pasteur had at least as much ethical problems (and legal questions) in his experimentation on people (c. 1885), and his cures also came through human experimentation, except his was not on Black slaves, and since he was sort-of successful he was never prosecuted, even though his legality was more questionable.
We need to keep the facts straight.
When honoring a person who had many accomplishments in life, it’s an open debate if you want to look at his negative side or not. You can make the argument that Jefferson wrote a good constitution and founded the US democracy. On the other hand you may want to focus on the slave owner part of him. But you definitely can’t make the argument that the people celebrating Jefferson celebrate his slave ownership. (This logic applies to every US president, including FDR).
However, when it comes to confederate symbols, they represent one and only thing. They represent the struggle of the south to keep enslaving, abusing and murdering slaves. No sane person honestly believes that it represents anything else. All the people pushing for these monuments are racists (openly or hidden). There should be no arugment that a fight to enslave people should not be celebrated.
We don’t place statues to teach history. We place statues to demonstrate what we glorify and hope to achieve ourselves.