Targeted Central Park statue’s subject has complicated history

Medical historians consider Dr. J. Marion Sims — memorialized in bronze and perched since 1934 atop a regal granite monument in Central Park — the father of modern gynecology.

New York state and city politicians, including City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, see a far less noble embodiment — a practitioner of painful experimental surgery on female African-American slaves.

And like political and community leaders in other American cities who are reconsidering the 21st century merits of monuments from a less equitable past, Mark-Viverito and others want Sims’ statue removed.