James Marion Sims

James Marion Sims was an American surgeon who developed a widely adopted technique for repairing vesicovaginal fistula, a severe injury of obstructed childbirth, and invented instruments including the Sims speculum still referenced in gynecology today; he later founded the Woman's Hospital in New York in 1855 and served as president of the American Medical Association. He developed his fistula repair technique between 1845 and 1849 in Alabama through repeated surgery on enslaved Black women and girls, most often named in the record as Anarcha, Lucy and Betsy, performed without anesthesia even after ether anesthesia became available, and without their ability to meaningfully consent or refuse as enslaved people under his control. Medical historians and ethicists now widely describe this record as a defining case of medical progress built on the exploitation of a population unable to refuse, and public monuments to Sims, including a statue removed from New York's Central Park in 2018, have become a focus of that reassessment.