James “J” Marion Sims is known as the father of gynecology. He is responsible for repairing vesicovaginal fistula. It’s an opening that develops between the bladder and the wall of the vagina. The result is that urine leaks out of the vagina. This surgery he discovered has been preserved as a great accomplishment — a life improving procedure still used to this day. Too bad this came at the exploitation of black women. These life threatening experiments caused excruciating pain. Some of his experiments were unsuccessful. A woman named “Lucy” for example, nearly died due to severe blood poisoning. He quartered these women in a small hospital behind his house in Montgomery, Alabama. Between late 1845 and the summer of 1849. He carried out repeated operations on these women. One teenager, a slave named Anarcha had to undergo either 13 to 30 operations (without anesthesia) before Sims got this particular procedure right. Once declared successful it was then deemed safe to perform on white patients. Adding to his legacy, he has a statue in his honor. This statue of J. Marion Sims was first erected in 1894 in Bryant Park, and then relocated to Central Park in 1934 to stand across the street from the New York Academy of Medicine, which became its permanent home. Nothing on the monument names the 11 enslaved women he inhumanely experimented on. In 2018, New York City removed the statue of J. Marion Sims from a pedestal in Central Park. The statue will be moved to a cemetery in Brooklyn where Sims, sometimes called the "father of gynecology," is buried. A new informational plaque will be added both to the empty pedestal and the relocated statue, and the city is commissioning new artwork to reflect the issues raised by Sims' legacy. Since 2010, it took public protests, 26K petition signatures, and multiple attempts to destroy the monument have finally resulted in its removal. Progress is a process. The names of three teenagers — Lucy, Betsey, and Anarcha — are largely all that is known of the dozen enslaved Black women who were horrifically experimented on. May their souls (and names unknown) rest well.