City Orders Sims Statue Removed From Central Park

As a non-white, non-black American, it pains me to see what's happening in this country. We are in the process of trying to re-write history, eliminate any indication of anything that may offend the black segment of our society, and go to the ridiculous extreme of force-fitting different races into every advertisement, movie and television show. All because the liberal media has got everyone worried about being called "racist". I'm waiting for the backlash, ad just hope, for all our sakes, that it's measured and rational.

Wow! I am so glad they removed that statue. Now it's as if he never existed. Whew, that was a close one fella'. However, I am not satisfied. I want them to remove all the dirt that surrounds where that statue used to be completely removed. I want them to remove all the dirt for 500 feet in every direction, including downwards. That's right. I want a 500 foot deep hole where that statue used to be and also 500 feet around it. Then I will feel better.... Do you see how dumb this is? Removing the statue has done NOTHING. He still exists in history, in books and in historical references. Because a few people were offended of something that happened over 100 years ago, we have to act and remove this "offensive" statue. You liberals are hilarious. Please, oh pretty please, come after the San Jacinto Monument outside of Houston because the Americans killed some Mexicans in a war. You want to re-write history which will never be re-written. Enjoy your fantasy....hahahahahaha

There are no statues to Dr.Josef Mengele in Germany. They don't memorialize the virtues of Unit 731 in Japan. The eminent Dr. Sims was a murderous barbarian in any age. The practice slavery was cruel enough in America. But the Dr. Sims took his depravity to a level matched only by Vlad the Impaler and the Marquis De Sade. Can you imagine the terror of his victims as they begged for mercy and screamed in pain? I can't. Why did he not conduct his experiments on his mother, his sisters, his daughters, his wife? Because those people were human to him, but his unfortunate slave victims were not. But his victims are all too human to me. I imagine they looked just like my mother, my wife, my sisters, my daughters. They laughed the same laughter, cried the same tears, and prayed to the same God. My loved ones would have felt the same pain had he performed his hideous experiments on them. I condemn any society that memorializes a monster such as the Dr. Sims. America is all too quick to erect statues to beasts and then claim its just history. We should take a lesson from Germany, there are no statues of Adolf Hitler in Germany, but no one in Germany has forgotten who he is, or what he represents. I don't need an icon to know that neither the right Dr. Sims nor the Honorable Jefferson Davis had my best interest or that of my sons at the forefront of their agendas. If we are to be a decent people lets act like it. Morality is timeless; ethics change with the wind.

Can we please remember that Dr. Marion Sims wasn't a sadist but a physician who actually cured women's fistulas in an operation that had recently been invented in Boston. And anesthesia had only just been invented and was not widely used. Most everyone just got a rag to chew while being operated on.

How could this statue have been created at all? Surgery without anesthesia ... is torture. My humble opinion would be to melt down the metal and create a memorial to the women he harmed.

I agree that the statue should have been removed from Fifth Avenue as he was scarcely the hero that other statues recall. It it should be placed in the Academy of Medicine, however, to remind doctors of the dark history which must not be repeated. Aside from his barbarous surgery on his slaves, he was known to be be quite knife happy once he moved up to NY, doing more surgery than his colleagues felt was necessary. One writer reported that he actually hated the vagina and sought to change it whenever possible. He was certainly a man of his time with his attitudes toward women and especially women of color. We must not forget what he was capable of.

Continued! ...and tried, in many cases, to lead virtuous lives. They also took part in practices we now rightly condemn, from the suppression of women's rights to the oppression of African-Americans. But are we to be condemned for our sins--for allowing the environment to be degraded or for nuclear weapons to be stockpiled in our time? We drive hybrids, take public transportation, give to environmental groups, vote for anti-war politicians, attend No Nukes rallies, on and on--none of which will matter if the planet we bequeath our great-great-grandchildren is choked with pollution and racked by superstorms and rampant flooding, let alone ravaged by nuclear war. We are, as we want future generations to understand, flawed human beings without any way to know the future struggling to get through our lives with decency and compassion, failing regularly, but trying to be good people. If we want our descendants to consider these things when they judge us, shouldn't we extend the same compassion to those who preceded us? Were they so different? I don't think so. Bearing in mind the vaccinations and works of art and technological advances we owe to them, I am inclined to deference towards my forebears--even when I disapprove sternly of some of their practices. At the very least, we should extend to our ancestors--and that which they saw fit to erect or establish--the mercy we hope history extends to us.

Most of us probably think of ourselves as decent people. We try to live meaningful, decent, honorable lives, and we succeed or fail in varying degrees. But future generations will have many questions about us: How could we have allowed the election of a man who will no doubt be remembered as doing grave harm to our democracy? How could we be so ecologically and environmentally heedless? How could we have stood silently by as our country built up an arsenal of weapons capable of destroying all life on Earth? How could we have allowed so many such easy access to such horrible weapons, resulting in the needless deaths of so many? The point is this: Those who come after us may well judge us harshly, along with whatever monuments to our values, ideals and achievements we erect. Of course, we feel this to be unfair; once more, we think of ourselves as decent people attempting to lead virtuous lives. We would naturally wish to be thought of with compassion by subsequent generations, and for the good we did to be weighed against whatever harm we wrought. That's entirely understandable, and it should encourage restraint in our thinking about our forebears. Even those of them who participated in the evils of their time did not wake each morning eagerly intent on harming the innocent. They loved their children, attended church or temple, gave to charities, fought bravely for their country, built roads and erected colleges and universities, helped people who tripped in the street...

Put nothing in it’s place. The park does not need any more statues. It’s the artful but natural landscape we want to see.

If the figure represented causes widespread offense, attention should be paid. However, rather than destroying the statue, now that it has achieved such celebrity/notoriety, why not turn that to profit and sell it to a collector, perhaps at auction? The resultant proceeds could then be used to benefit appropriate communities.

I agree that the simple relocation of the statue from Central Park to Bk, does not solve the underlying problem. When it comes to all such statues, and deciding which should be removed or demolished, I guess it begs the question... 'does a statue of a person, by default, carry a clear implication that that person was someone to be honored or admired?....or can some statues be erected, not as a form of 'honor', but as a way to recall history, be that history good or bad? I think it's fair to say that even those who've done something laudable, have also done some bad things in their lives. At what point do we decide that that person's 'bad' outweighs the good...that they are not deserving of a statue of themself? Is there a difference between a person 's accomplishing some good deeds, and separately, some bad? ...versus what of the person whose good deeds were made possible, by the mistreatment of others?' I don't have the answers, but I think many such questions need to be considered.

I don't know the truth about Dr. Sims, but I have no reason to believe that Mr. de Blasio is capable of evaluating historical research into the matter. I can foresee a future without any public art whatsoever. No explorers (they opened up the continent to be exploited by greedy Europeans), no heroes (someone is sure to find out that they were actually asleep at the switch, or that their grandparents owned slaves, or that they were unkind to dogs), no Hans Christian Anderson (too Christian), no Alice in Wonderland (she took drugs), no library lions (they eat wildlife indiscriminately, even endangered species!). I have great fondness for some of the statues around the city, but I'm afraid to tell anyone about them, as that may get back to City Hall, and the next thing you know, they're being moved to some cemetery.

I surprisingly find myself agreeing with the decision. Relocation of the statue seems to be a reasonable solution for all sides.

Another good reason to remove this statue is probably to eliminate the chance of having it conflated with "The Sims", a popular and harmless video game.

A statue of a Gynocologist on Fifth Avenue has always seemed a bit strange to me. However, the reasons given for taking it away are not correct. Syms did not operate on random slave women. He was the first to suture tears in the vaginal wall caused by childbirth. This was a painful and potentially fatal condition that did not heal on its own. In many cases he saved women from a lifetime of pain and from premature death. There was no anesthesia available until decades later. His work established the field of Gynocology and of course benefited all women. But the current narrative is an ignorant one about a white man sadistically causing pain to slave women.

Hooray, Finally! I live in Harlem and have to walk past the statue of this odious man all the time. I'm so happy the statue will be gone soon!

The Journal of Medical Ethics published an article titled "The medical ethics of Dr J Marion Sims: a fresh look at the historical record" by LL Wall in 2006 goes into the debate much better than I can. Here's the abstract, "Numerous modern authors have attacked Sims's medical ethics, arguing that he manipulated the institution of slavery to perform ethically unacceptable human experiments on powerless, unconsenting women. This article reviews these allegations using primary historical source material and concludes that the charges that have been made against Sims are largely without merit. Sims's modern critics have discounted the enormous suffering experienced by fistula victims, have ignored the controversies that surrounded the introduction of anaesthesia into surgical practice in the middle of the 19th century, and have consistently misrepresented the historical record in their attacks on Sims. Although enslaved African American women certainly represented a “vulnerable population” in the 19th century American South, the evidence suggests that Sims's original patients were willing participants in his surgical attempts to cure their affliction—a condition for which no other viable therapy existed at that time." I don't have the resources to research this issue but it looks like the Public Design Commission had the chance. Given their decision and more importantly their discussion of their decision, it seems like a lot of evidence was not taken into consideration.

Who says the residents of Green-Wood cemetery want this relocated to their proximity and what's that going to cost us? Bronze should get a good price by the pound. Melt it down.

I'm not a fan of Sims, and it really doesn't break my heart to hear that his monument is being moved to a cemetery. Cities evolve and times change. What's problematic for me is that I thought NYers were a tougher lot than this, and that the motivations are to protect ourselves from the warts of history. I'm not sure who the victors are in "woke", grievance politics, but congratulations.

Monuments don’t keep the past alive. Generations come and go, and each one leaves monuments in the hope of—what?—remembrance. It’s a fool’s game. Central Park is one of most needlessly monument-cluttered parks in America. How anyone can mourn the loss of an obscure monument like this one is beyond me. For our era, it is a testament to who we are that we had it removed for cause; that's a legacy worth passing on to future generations. These acts are our monuments.

As I remember it, I don't believe a place at that corner of the park is any honor. Probably a suitable purgatory.

They should have left it there with a big plaque explaining everything. It would be more educational. Removing and hiding all these historical symbols and relics from the past removes from consciousness the existence of the past world. Now even fewer people will know who Sims was and what and why he did the things he did and why it was once thought right to honor him. With all the symbols removed people will slowly, as time passes, forget all about how bad slavery was: they will only remember Scarlett and Mammy from watching Netflix.

Virginia Apgar, American physician, OBGYN and anesthesiologist, creator of the Apgar score to access the health of newborns, March of Dimes advocate, and the first woman granted a full professorship at Colombia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, would be a fitting subject to replace Dr. Sims.

Here again we see it asserted that Sims operated on slaves "without anesthesia," with no mention made of the fact that there essentially was no effective anesthesia at that time. Or that the slaves had real medical problems that were causing them suffering, suffering that was alleviated in many cases by the procedures. The reporting on this topic has been incompetent at best and willfully dishonest at worst.

This statue should have been removed long ago, and I am not sure why it is being transferred to a cemetery. History matters, but we don't have to honor deliberate barbarity. We consider Josef Mengele a monster, and yet we have kept a statue honoring one of equivalent character.

Finally--I've walked past that statue, knowing the awful history of his cruelty and wished it gone many a time. I think it should be demolished, not moved. Statues in human likenesses are meant to exalt a person's role in history--I'd soon have likenesses of Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy than of the doctor who subjected them to surgery without anesthesia when anesthesia was available.