Image credit: EastHarlem.com
Several months ago, I stumbled
across an essay about Dr. J. Marion Sims, often referred to as the
"father" of modern gynecology. Sims has been credited with devising
ground-breaking surgical procedures that greatly improved the lives of women in
the 19th century. Because of his work, statues of Sims can be found at
the site of the New York Academy of Medicine, and in Montgomery, Alabama, where
Sims lived and practiced medicine between 1845 and 1849.
And those statues are at the core
of a controversy. Sims' critics claim that much of his experimentation was
conducted on enslaved black women, and that many of his surgeries were
performed without anesthesia; those critics argue that his statues should be
removed because so much of his work was done at the expense of an enslaved
and vulnerable population. Sims' proponents argue that we cannot place his work
under our modern microscope to determine its ethics, claiming that he began
performing life-saving procedures even before the use of anesthesia was considered
safe, and that he performed his first pioneering surgeries, without anesthesia,
on free and slave women, alike.
The controversy around Sims - a
figure with whom I had not been at all acquainted - was eye-opening for me: The
only reason that we were talking about Dr. Sims was because of these statues.
But for these statues "honoring" Dr. Sims, none of us would be in
dialogue about him, his work, and what we all might learn from that history.
And that gave me even more cause
for pause than I already had about the removal of historical plaques, markers,
and monuments in our communities. Would we still have reason to have open,
critical, and revelatory conversations about the world that existed before our
time if the name of every historical figure whose actions might offend our
modern sensibilities was removed from our public spaces? More importantly, can
we honestly believe that we can experience the kind of healing that is needed
in our communities apart from our being able to engage in these kinds of honest
conversations?
As a Christian minister, I try to put all of this into the context of what we learn in scripture: The fact that we are told in Genesis
that Abraham took his slave woman, Hagar, and his firstborn son, Ishmael, into
the wilderness and left them, presumably, to die, is not a reason for us to stop studying scriptures
or to fail to recognize Abraham as a pillar of our faith tradition. The fact that we are told that Jacob's sons sold their brother, Joseph, into slavery out of jealousy is not a reason for us to stop studying scriptures, or to learn from "the rest of the story" that the sojourn of the people called Israel into Egypt (beginning with Joseph) likely saved them from famine and finally gave them a place in which Abraham's descendants could indeed grow to be as many as the stars in the sky. And while
reading the account of Hagar's banishment, or the Genesis account of Joseph's brothers
selling him into slavery, may make us uncomfortable, studying these texts
should invite us - rather than judging our forebears under our modern microscope - to ask ourselves questions and to examine our own existence. What do we learn? When have we, too, displaced those in
our own lives who are no longer useful to us? When have we, too, been willing to
trade the life of a sister or brother made in the image and likeness of our
Creator God for a few pieces of silver? Through these Biblical accounts, we are called to ask ourselves how God might call us to live
differently.
So, as I ponder what we, in our modern culture, should consider in the debate about removing or renaming historical markers, monuments and statues, the same question arises for
me: How might we be called to learn
from the lives of these historical figures, and live differently in our own
time?
And if we rename everything in our public space, what holds us accountable to one another to remember even the "ugly" of our history and learn from it?
