The Complicated Legacy of Dr. J. Marion Sims

The controversial statue of Dr. J. Marion Sims have been moved to his gravesite at Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery

The city removed a statue of the controversial gynecologist J. Marion Sims from its perch in Central Park Tuesday. Barron Lerner, bioethicist, historian of medicine and internist at New York University’s Langone Medical Center and the author of The Good Doctor: A Father, a Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics  (Beacon Press, 2014), and Harriet Washington, medical ethicist and the author of Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We "Catch" Mental Illness  (Back Bay Books, 2016), discuss the legacy of the doctor who experimented on slaves, but also pioneered the cure for fistula, a complication of childbirth, and what his story teaches us about ethics in medicine.