Statue Of Controversial Doctor Removed From Central Park… And Sent To Brooklyn

Today, the statue of controversial 19th-century medical pioneer J. Marion Sims has been taken down from its Central Park perch in East Harlem to be sent to Brooklyn and installed in Green-Wood Cemetery, where Sims’ body is interred.

The City’s Public Design Commission voted unanimously on Monday to remove the statue from 5th Avenue and 103rd Street, after a commission created by Mayor De Blasio recommended the change.

The Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers was created in the wake of the national conversation on public monuments following the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia last year.

The commission held a public hearing in Brooklyn last November, as part of a series of discussions throughout the five boroughs. At that time, many spoke out against the statue of Sims, though the majority of the debate centered on representations of Christopher Columbus throughout the city.

Considered a pioneer in gynecological surgery, Sims’ legacy has been reconsidered after records revealed that the surgeon operated on 12 enslaved women—without anesthesia.

This morning, the Parks Department brought out a forklift to gently lower the statue from its pedestal, then strapped it to the back of a flatbed truck to be carted away. More monuments stand to Sims in other parts of the United States: one at his alma mater, Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, and two more in the state capitols of Alabama and South Carolina.

Of course, while moving the statue out of a position of prominence along Central Park and relegating it to the south-west corner of a large cemetery is certainly a statement, some feel that the statue shouldn’t be displayed at all.

As far as Green-Wood Cemetary is concerned, J. Marion Sims is definitively absent from their list of “famous residents,” and his gravesite must be located via the search function.

The debate over removing monuments based on a modern context for their origins is a tricky one: do we accept and contextualize our history and its monuments, or are we obligated to eliminate those monuments based on morally unfit models? And if so, are we sanitizing history in a dangerous way?

From the tenor of the national and New York discussion, monuments to Columbus are here to stay, though perhaps with additional context. But what do you think about someone like Sims: should his statue come to Brooklyn, or should it be banished forever?