Posted on 08/26/2017 6:26:05 PM PDT by Olog-hai
A controversial statue in New York of a doctor who operated on enslaved women has been defaced by a vandal who spray-painted the word “racist” on it.
The Daily News reports that the graffiti defacing the statue of Dr. J. Marion Sims in Central Park was discovered early Saturday. […]
Sims was known as the father of modern gynecology. But critics say his use of enslaved African-American women as experimental subjects was unethical. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
In the 19th century, vesicovaginal fistulas was a common, socially destructive, and "catastrophic complication of childbirth," that affected many women and had no effective cure or treatment. Vesicovaginal fistulas occurs when the woman's bladder, cervix and vagina become trapped between the fetal skull and the woman's pelvis, cutting off blood flow, leading to tissue death. The necrotic tissue later sloughs off, leaving a hole. Following this injury, as urine forms, it leaks out of the vaginal opening, leading to a form of incontinence where a continuous stream of urine leaks from the vagina, which may lead to marginalization from society, vaginal irritation, scarring and loss of vaginal function. Sims also worked to repair rectovaginal fistulas, a condition where flatulence and feces escapes through the vagina, leading to fecal incontinence.
Obviously a racist monster. /sarcasm
I had no idea such things were even possible.
Me either. Ya, thanks for those nice mental images Robert.
By the time these ‘noble’ protesters are done removing statues they find offensive to them, all we’re going to be left with are a few statues of communist mass murderer Mao Tse-tung.
I don’t know anything about J. Marion Sims, but I do know that a slave has no rights, and slavery is alive and well in the world today. There is no greater evil. We must do our best to eradicate this evil from the earth.
I seem to learn something new more & more myself with the passage of time, because I just found out myself. My curiosity was peaked to learn what the “experimental” surgery was the “racist” doctor was engaging in, since the article so conveniently left out what that was. So was he being a racist, or was he just using those who were likely more willing to accept the risks involved to correct something that they probably couldn’t have afforded if he had limited his practice of his theory solely upon white women? No doubt he would have been labeled a racist had he gone that route as well. At the very least I am sure he would have been condemned as a misogynist.
Sorry, but not all knowledge is about things of beauty or even pleasant. 8>) But now at least you know what his “experimental” surgery actually involved. I wonder how many who condemn him, know what that really was all about.
In other words, he saved countless women, black and white. Much the same as the others who did good but are being banned.
I thought it was very interesting!
Women in general should be very thankful that male doctors advanced the science of gynecology.
Just sayin’.
Abstract:
Vesicovaginal fistula was a catastrophic complication of childbirth among 19th century American women. The first consistently successful operation for this condition was developed by Dr J Marion Sims, an Alabama surgeon who carried out a series of experimental operations on black slave women between 1845 and 1849.
Numerous modern authors have attacked Sims’s medical ethics, arguing that he manipulated the institution of slavery to perform ethically unacceptable human experiments on powerless, unconsenting women.
This article reviews these allegations using primary historical source material and concludes that the charges that have been made against Sims are largely without merit.
Sims’s modern critics have discounted the enormous suffering experienced by fistula victims, have ignored the controversies that surrounded the introduction of anaesthesia into surgical practice in the middle of the 19th century, and have consistently misrepresented the historical record in their attacks on Sims.
Although enslaved African American women certainly represented a “vulnerable population” in the 19th century American South, the evidence suggests that Sims’s original patients were willing participants in his surgical attempts to cure their affliction—a condition for which no other viable therapy existed at that time.
Dedicated in 1894, this bronze and granite monument stands on the Park perimeter in honor of Dr. James Marion Sims, a surgeon regarded as the father of modern gynecology. Sims' work is often credited for giving the field status as a separate medical specialty.
He founded the first hospital for women in America in New York City in 1855. In recent years he has become a controversial figure for his use of slaves as experimental subjects. The statue was originally dedicated in Bryant Park and brought to this present site in 1934 across from the Academy of Medicine, of which Dr. Sims was a member.
Location: Perimeter Wall at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street
http://www.centralparknyc.org/things-to-see-and-do/attractions/dr-j-marion-sims.html
In Montgomery between 1845 and 1849, Sims experimented by surgery on 12 enslaved women with fistulas, brought to him by their masters; Sims took responsibility for their care on the condition that the masters provide clothing and pay taxes.[9]
He named three enslaved women in his records: Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy. Each suffered from fistula, and all were subjected to his surgical experimentation.[2] From 1845 to 1849 he experimented on each of them several times, operating on Anarcha 13 times before her fistula repair was declared a success.[7]
She had both vesicovaginal and rectovaginal fistulas, which he struggled to repair.[6]
Although anesthesia had recently become available, Sims did not use any anesthetic during his procedures on Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy.[2] According to Sims, it was not yet fully accepted into surgical practice and he was unaware of the possibility of the use of diethyl ether.[6][9]
Ether as an anesthetic was available as early as the beginning of 1842.[9] A review of the ethics of Sims work in the Journal of Medical Ethics stated ether anesthesia was publicly demonstrated in Boston in 1846, a year after Sims began his experimentation, and that while its use as an anesthetic spread rapidly, it was not universally accepted at the time of Sims experiments.[8]
A common belief at the time was that black people did not feel as much pain as white people, and thus did not require anesthesia when undergoing surgery.[10] One patient nearly died from septicemia as he operated on her without anesthetics in the presence of twelve doctors, following the experimental use of a sponge to wipe urine from the bladder during the procedure.[7] He did administer opium to the women after their surgery, which was accepted therapeutic practice of the day.[11]
After the extensive experiments and complications, Sims finally perfected his technique. He repaired the fistula successfully in Anarcha.
His technique using silver-wire sutures led to successful repair of a fistula, and this was first reported in Sims’ published surgical reports in 1852.[1]
He was then able to repair the fistulas of several other enslaved women under his medical authority.[12]
According to Durrenda Ojanuga from the University of Alabama “Many white women came to Sims for treatment of vesicovaginal fistula after the successful operation on Anarcha. However, none of them, due to the pain, were able to endure a single operation.”
The Journal of Medical Ethics reports a case study of one white woman, whose fistula was repaired by Sims without the use of anesthesia, in a series of three operations carried out in 1849.[8]
Sims later moved to New York to found a Women’s Hospital where he performed the operation on white women. According to Durrenda Ojanuga, writing for the Journal of Medical Ethics, Sims used anesthesia when conducting fistula repair on white women.
LL Hall, also writing for the Journal of Medical Ethics, states that as of 1857, Sims did not use anesthesia to perform fistula surgery on white woman, citing a public lecture where Sims spoke to the New York Academy of Medicine on November 18, 1857.
During this lecture, Sims stated he never used anesthesia for fistula surgery “because they are not painful enough to justify the trouble and risk attending their administration”.
Describing this as shocking by modern sensibilities, Hall also describes this as a product of 1800s sensibilities, particularly among surgeons who began their practice in the pre-anethestic era. [8][7][10][3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Marion_Sims#Experimental_victims
When it comes to choosing, the DemocRats choose abortion first, then Muslims and illegal aliens, then gays, and then blacks.
I’m sure most blacks know the name of...... What was it again?
“and slavery is alive and well in the world today.”
Very true.
“There is no greater evil.”
Selling drugs — poison — to children ranks up there somewhere.
Well, if he used slaves that didn’t want to be experimented on then he’s a terrible human being. It’s like those guys that infected a bunch of black army guys with gonorrhea or whatever as an experiment.
The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, also known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study or Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was an infamous clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service. The purpose of this study was to observe the natural progression of untreated syphilis in rural African-American men in Alabama under the guise of receiving free health care from the United States government.
The Public Health Service started working on this study in 1932, in collaboration with Tuskegee University, a historically black college in Alabama. Investigators enrolled in the study a total of 600 impoverished, African American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama. Of these men, 399 had previously contracted syphilis before the study began, and 201 did not have the disease. The men were given free medical care, meals, and free burial insurance for participating in the study. After funding for treatment was lost, the study was continued without informing the men they would never be treated. None of the men infected were ever told they had the disease, and none were treated with penicillin even after the antibiotic was proven to successfully treat syphilis. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the men were told they were being treated for "bad blood", a local term for various illnesses that include syphilis, anemia, and fatigue.
The 40-year study was controversial for reasons related to ethical standards. Researchers knowingly failed to treat patients appropriately after the 1940s validation of penicillin was found as an effective cure for the disease they were studying. Revelation in 1972 of study failures by a whistleblower led to major changes in U.S. law and regulation on the protection of participants in clinical studies. Now studies require informed consent, communication of diagnosis, and accurate reporting of test results.
By 1947, penicillin had become the standard treatment for syphilis. Choices available to the doctors involved in the study might have included treating all syphilitic subjects and closing the study, or splitting off a control group for testing with penicillin. Instead, the Tuskegee scientists continued the study without treating any participants; they withheld penicillin and information about it from the patients. In addition, scientists prevented participants from accessing syphilis treatment programs available to other residents in the area. The study continued, under numerous US Public Health Service supervisors, until 1972, when a leak to the press resulted in its termination on November 16 of that year. The victims of the study, all African American, included numerous men who died of syphilis, 40 wives who contracted the disease, and 19 children born with congenital syphilis.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, cited as "arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history", led to the 1979 Belmont Report and the establishment of the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP). It also led to federal laws and regulations requiring Institutional Review Boards for the protection of human subjects in studies involving them. The Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) manages this responsibility within the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
So as you can see, no one was infected that had been previously disease free, & they were not black men in the military.. The horror instead was the denial of treatment even though a known cure had been confirmed decades before the study was stopped.Now if it can be proven that this man either experimented upon women who had not been afflicted with this problem, or he made the condition exist by artificial means, then by all means he was a monster. So far I have seen nothing that even suggests that this occurred.
Now there have been accusations that American researchers infected Guatemalans in the military, along with mental patients and prisoners, with syphilis and gonorrhea, then left without treating them, back in 1948. The experiments’ discovery—was made by Susan Reverby, a historian at Wellesley College, in 2003. I personally haven't seen the evidence to support the claim, but in 20109 then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had issued a public apology to the government of Guatemala for violating its citizens’ human rights.
Susan Reverby,
When people speak of the horrors of slavery in the past, at first I recoil in horror myself; then I think: "Why aren't you trying to eradicate the horrors of slavery from the world today instead of focusing on the horrors of the distant past?"
We are all no doubt descendants of slaves and enslavers, knowledge of which is lost in the darkness of prehistory.
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