J. Marion Sims was a gynecologist in the 1800s who purchased Black women slaves and used them as guinea pigs for his untested surgical experiments. He repeatedly performed genital surgery on Black women WITHOUT ANESTHESIA because according to him, “Black women don’t feel pain.” Despite his inhumane tests on Black women, Sims was named “the father of modern gynecology”, and his statue currently stands right outside of the New York Academy of Medicine.
SOME statues really do need to come down.
But not the way the hypocrites are going about it.
“When science goes beyond the objective observation of facts and attempts to appraise and explain them, the field opens wide for speculation; each one then advances a theory of his own, trying to make it prevail and defending it relentlessly. Do we not see every day the most contradictory opinions, one after another, be proposed and rejected, sometimes repealed as absurd errors, only to be later proclaimed as indisputable truths? Facts are the sole criterion of reality, the argument that admits of no reply. In the absence of facts, doubt is the choice of the wise man.” ~ The Spirits’ Book, by Allan Kardec