The Doctor Of Modern Gynecology ?

Before Josef Mengele, the Nazi angel of death, at who’s hands hundreds died in macabre genetic experiments at Auschwitz during WWII, there was the so called doctor of modern gynecology. J. Marion Sims. He was born in Lancaster County, South Carolina,  the son of John and Mahala Sims in 1813. In 1832, after two years of study at the South Carolina College, he took a three-month course at the Medical College of Charleston.  Later moving to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1834, he enrolled at the Jefferson Medical College, where he graduated in 1835. He then returned to Lancaster to practice, but after the deaths of his first two patients, he left and set up a practice in Mount Meigs, Alabama. After a few years he returned home, where he married Theresa Jones, who had been a childhood sweetheart. In 1840 they moved back to Alabama, where Sims took up surgery and gynecology, opening a practice in Montgomery. So to make sure we are on the same page, we are talking about they moved to the deep south, twenty years before the Civil War.

In the mid-19th century, gynecology was not a well-developed field, social norms regarded the medical study and examination of the female reproductive anatomy as immoral. In medical school, doctors were often trained on dummies to deliver babies. They did not see their first actual cases of women in need until beginning their practices. As a result, Sims had no formal background in gynecology prior to beginning his practice in Alabama. From 1845 to 1849, Sims started doing experiments on slave women to treat vaginal problems. He developed techniques that have been the basis of modern vaginal surgery. The Sims’ vaginal speculum aided in vaginal examination and surgery. At this point you might be wondering what all the fuss is about. Why am I equating the doctor of modern gynecology with the maniac and deviant misanthrope of Auschwitz, Josef Mengele?  Well, I’m going to get to that in a few seconds after a little more background. In the 19th century, vesicovaginal fistulas were a common, socially destructive, and “catastrophic complication of childbirth, that affected many women and had no effective cure or treatment. Women generally had a high rate of childbirth, increasing their rate of complications. Vesicovaginal fistulas occur when the woman’s bladder, cervix and vagina become trapped between the fetal skull and the woman’s pelvis, cutting off blood flow and leading to tissue death. The necrotic tissue later sloughs off, leaving a hole. Obviously this condition required surgery. So at last we come to the reason I made my comparison. Although anesthesia had been known as early as 1842, the doctor did not use it when operating on the slaves, sometimes repeatedly on the same woman. In addition, 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. Feel me. Sims later moved to New York to found a Women’s Hospital, where he performed the operation on white women. According to an article written for the Journal of Medical Ethics, Sims used anesthesia when conducting fistula repair on white women.

In 1890 a bronze statue of Sims had been cast and later move to Central Park in New York around 1934, where it has since stood directly across from New York Academy of Medicine. That is up until last week. The decision to remove the statue was approved by New York City’s Public Design Commission after Mayor Bill de Blasio created the task force following protests across the country over Confederate statues. The city will relocate the statue to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, where Sims is buried. Oh yes one more thing, a plaque next to his statue in Central Park read, “His brilliant achievement carried the fame of American surgery throughout the entire world.” I’ll just leave that right there.

Reprint April 2018 © Hill1News