Your Editorial created one more flashpoint in the current US debate about Confederate monuments (see Nature 549, 5–6; 2017 and Nature http://doi.org/ccvm; 2017).

The concern is what kind of history we memorialize in the statues of J. Marion Sims (1813–83) that stand outside the New York Academy of Medicine and in South Carolina and Alabama. As historians of science and medicine, we hope that the controversy over these will stop researchers relying on stories of scientific achievement that are blind to the moral and ethical assumptions and practices that made such achievements possible.

Sims used enslaved women to perfect a technique for repairing fistulas resulting from traumatic births. He was dubbed “the father of American gynaecology” by generations of white physicians (see also M. H. Green Nature 549, 160; 2017). Many contemporary writers question whether Sims' practices should be viewed as unethical, given that he worked in an era when the use of slave bodies for medical experimentation was common and sanctioned by the US medical profession. This assumes that there were no objections to Sims' experiments at the time, but some physicians in the north and south of the United States found them controversial and excessive (Anon. N. Am. Med. Chir. Rev. 2, 635–652; 1858).

You remark that Sims' achievements saved the lives of “black and white women alike”. There is little evidence that he or other white physicians of his time applied these to improve treatment for black women. Well into the twentieth century, it was more common to deny black women any treatment at all for gynaecological ills.