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Statues: researchers to mind their history

Nature volume 549, page 334 (2017)Cite this article

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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.

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  1. Hammonds Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    Evelynn M. Hammonds

  2. Wellesley College, Massachusetts, USA

    Susan M. Reverby

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  1. Evelynn M. Hammonds
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  2. Susan M. Reverby
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Correspondence to Evelynn M. Hammonds.

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Hammonds, E., Reverby, S. Statues: researchers to mind their history. Nature 549, 334 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/549334b

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