IDKMYDE: J Marion Sims

J. Marion Sims, once hailed as the “father of modern gynecology,” built his legacy on exploiting enslaved Black women without anesthesia, turning medical progress into a horrifying practice. His statue in Central Park may have come down, but the lessons about injustice and racism in medicine are still standing strong. Learn more in today’s episode of IDKMYDE!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
On today's episode. If I didn't know, maybe you didn't either.
I want to introduce to you Jay Marion Sims. They
call him the father of modern gynecology. That man was
just Satan in scrubs.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
I didn't know. Maybe I didn't know. I didn't know.
I didn't know. I didn't know. I didn't know.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Jay Marion Sims. He developed life saving medical techniques back
in the eighteen hundreds, but the way he did it wild.
He experimented on enslaved black women without anesthesia, like, Hey,
I'm about to cut you open, all right, but don't worry.
You'll be fine because you Blacks don't feel pain quite
like I did. That's literally what he believed, and people

(00:51):
let him get away with it. Three women have been
documented Anarca, Lucy, and Betsy, and these three women went
through hell. Anarca alone had over thirty surgeries, thirty with
no anesthesia, and Sims called it science. And you know
what he got for it, a statue in Central Park.
Like imagine going for a jog and seeing a dude

(01:13):
being honored for torturing black women. That was a reality
before twenty eighteen, because in twenty eighteen, activists showed up
in bloody hospital gowns so that you could visualize these
atrocities and pretty much said, Nah, the statue's gotta go.
And guess what they won. The statue got moved to
a cemetery, and quite honestly, that's where it belongs. Right beside,

(01:35):
Jay Marion Sims is dead Ethics. Now here's where it
gets real. You think this was just some old school nonsense, right, Nah,
those same eracist ideas are still here, lurking in hospitals
like bad Wi Fi studies showed doctors today still think
black women feel less pain. That's why black women are

(01:55):
three times more likely to die from childbirth complications. Three times. Meanwhile,
Karen over there getting extra toleranol for a paper cut.
Make it make sense? So what do we do? First,
stop giving shady people statues? But more importantly, we gotta
listen when people say they're in pain or need help.

(02:15):
We need to believe them because if Anarca, Lucy and
Betsy could survive all that, the least we can do
is make sure that nobody else has to. And I
didn't know. Maybe you didn't either.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
I didn't