I have no particularly strong opinion on the removal or permanence of the statue but what's up with that sign in one of the photos? "Believe black women"? That just triggered some PTSD from the "Listen and believe" bullshit.
It will be relocated to the cemetery where he is buried, with a plaque next to it explaining how his experiments were tied to slavery, and also naming the women who were experimented on.
b-b-b-but my history
Good riddance.
Nevertheless, the experiments continued, as Sims obsessively sought to
perfect his procedure and his tools, including silver sutures used to
stitch the hole between the bladder and vagina. Eventually, his
assistants gave up on him. The enslaved women — “confident” that he
could heal them, he wrote — began assisting him themselves. Some fellow
doctors, aware of Sims’s repeated failures, wrote to him cautioning that
perhaps he should stop the experiments.
...
“Dr. Sims, ‘the father of gynaecology,’ was the first doctor to perfect a
successful technique for the cure of vesico-vaginal fistula,” a social
work professor at the University of Alabama wrote in one 1993 paper in
the Journal of Medical Ethics, “yet despite his accolades, in his quest
for fame and recognition, he manipulated the social institution of
slavery to perform human experimentations, which by any standard is
unacceptable.”
Wait, at first I thought that he was running a torture show based on how strong the response was, but after reading it it doesn't sound like that what was going on at all...
A alright person acting within a immoral system isn't all that great a person imo.
The quote you posted has every single reason why this guy's statue should be removed. He might have perfected it in the end but even surgeons of the time told him to stop experimenting on slaves. This is from an era just before Henry Cotton, who was praised for wholesale extracting people's entire digestive tracts in the hopes it would cure schizophrenia. It should probably tell you something about how fucked up his procedures were in their early iteration that even surgeons of that era told him to cram it.
This is from an era that still approved of clitoridectomy as a means of curing "female hysteria".
More like "bye-necology".
Good riddance though. Experimentation without consent is basically torture.
No, surgeons of the time told him to stop trying to do the procedure because he was failing.
Did I at all say that it should be absolved? Did I say that what he did was right, or moral, or just? Did I say that the ends justified the means?
Fuck no. I'm just viewing things through a historical lens. These women had a condition that was completely incurable, and from what I've read, they were very willing to get it treated if such a thing was possible. And honestly? This is just flat-out not comparable to the experiments that went on at Unit 731. Don't even try to compare them, because you're 100% wrong. You literally cannot compare a doctor actually attempting to cure people to tying people to posts near a bomb to see how badly it maims them.
He wasn't a saint, the extremely immoral part of the procedures should be noted, and preserved, and put in bold lettering, but that doesn't somehow make him a terrible person. Again, if I'm missing some sort of literature that reveals that he was doing this for his sick pleasure or that his patients were begging to be let go, please prove me wrong.
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