J. Marion Sims was a New York City born doctor who is honored with a statue on the grounds of the Alabama Capitol.
The Medical Association of the State of Alabama installed the statue of Sims in 1937, honoring him for his work developing a surgical procedure to repair:
"incurable cases of vesico-vaginal fistula (an abnormal tract between the bladder and vagina). Enslaved women were particularly prone to this side effect of childbirth, due to the coercive “breeding” practices of slave-owners and widespread sexual exploitation. For Sims’ fistula patients, the memory of these years would have been unbearable, as they were subject to repeated surgery, without anesthesia.
Sims is a typical example of a slave-owning, slave-trading, racist medical researcher, of which there were an abundance in antebellum America. Medical experiments on the enslaved were commonplace throughout the era of slavery. Sims, however, proved particularly shrewd in having positioned his medical practice and backyard private hospital at the heart of Montgomery’s booming slave-trading district." (From an Smithsonian article).
The women were enslaved, and did not---could not---consent to the operations he performed. Most of the names of the women whom he mistreated are lost, but Sims names three in his notes, with typical disregard for anything but their first names: Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey.
There was a movement in 2018 to remove Sims statue on the Alabama Capital grounds, but it went nowhere. Another Sims statue was quickly removed from New York City's Central Park.
Now a monument to the women he operated on is being developed, though it will not be on the capital grounds. Instead, it will be some 36-hundred feet away, on land near the EJI lynching memorial (The National Memorial for Peace and Justice) behind the Montgomery Federal Courthouse.
The new memorial is being developed in three stages, and you can read about the $2.4-Million project HERE.
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