linguistic:translation, information:extraction, information:classification
James Marion Sims was an American physician in the field of surgery. His most famous work was the development of a surgical technique for the repair of vesicovaginal fistula, a severe complication of obstructed childbirth. He is also remembered for inventing the Sims speculum, Sims sigmoid catheter, and the Sims position. Against significant opposition, he established, in New York, the first hospital specifically for women. He was forced out of the hospital he founded because he insisted on treating cancer patients; he played a small role in the creation of the nation's first cancer hospital, which opened after his death. He was one of the most famous and venerated physicians in the country. In 1876, he was elected President of the American Medical Association. He was one of the first American physicians to become famous in Europe. He openly boasted that he was the second-wealthiest doctor in the country. However, as medical ethicist Barron H. Lerner states, "one would be hard pressed to find a more controversial figure in the history of medicine." A statue in his honor, the first statue in the United States in honor of a physician, was erected in 1894 in Bryant Park in New York City, but removed in 2018. There are ethical questions raised by how he developed his surgical techniques. He operated without anesthesia on enslaved black women and girls. In the twentieth century, this was condemned as an improper use of human experimental subjects and Sims was described as "a prime example of progress in the medical profession made at the expense of a vulnerable population". Sims' practices were defended as consistent with the US in the era in which he lived by physician and anthropologist L. Lewis Wall, and other medical historians. According to Sims, the enslaved black women were "willing" and had no better option. Sims was a prolific writer and his published reports on his medical experiments, together with his own 471-page autobiography, are the main sources of knowledge about him and his career. His positive self-presentation has, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, been subject to revision.