To understand the dark history of gynecology is to understand the legacy of J. Marion Sims. His inhumane practices are directly connected to how women are examined in the medical field today. 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. Still, his legacy is it’s greatly improved the lives of affected women and established a foundation for future gynecological surgeries. He is written into history as an educator and mentor, playing a crucial role in shaping the future of the profession, teaching many students who would go on to become influential physicians. Advocating for specialized care and helping to establish gynecology as a distinct and essential medical discipline. In 1876, he was elected President of the American Medical Association, and became the second-wealthiest doctor in the country. This legacy does not mention that he quartered female slaves 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. Unable to refuse treatment or withhold consent, Lucy, Anarcha, and Sims’s other enslaved patients were powerless to protect themselves from medical exploitation. During and after enslavement, physicians often denied Black people basic dignity. 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, using anesthesia. Sims’ decision to not use anesthesia—or any other numbing technique on the black girls and women he experimented on was based on the belief that black people didn’t experience pain like white people did. Before and after his gynecological experiments, he also tested surgical treatments on enslaved Black children in an effort to treat “trismus nascentium” (neonatal tetanus)—with little to no success. Tetanus is a deadly disease that attacks the nerves and muscles of the body. It starts off as a skin wound contaminated by bacterium that is commonly found on the ground. It usually gets transmitted from an unvaccinated mother and enters the body through infection of unhealed umbilical stump. This typically happens when the umbilical cord is cut using unsterile instruments. Sims also believed that African Americans were less intelligent than white people, and thought it was because their skulls grew too quickly around their brain. He would operate on African American children using a shoemaker’s tool to pry their bones apart and loosen their skulls. In the 1850s, Sims moved to New York and opened the first-ever Woman’s Hospital, where he continued testing controversial medical treatments on his patients. When any of Sims’s patients died, the blame, according to him, lay squarely with “the sloth and ignorance of their mothers and the Black midwives who attended them.” He did not believe anything was wrong with his methods. 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.