Page 112

“There were three problems…”

I am using the context of this speech to lay out the details of Sims’s fistula cure, as it was described in his 1852 paper. Because Sims never detailed the experiments in order—to the chagrin of Nathan Bozeman, who would criticize Sims for his failure to do so even after Sims died—it’s possible that his earliest experiments included other techniques or devices that he never subsequently described (apart from the evolution of his catheter, which he did describe). So this speech is speculative, but it is in keeping with what documentation is available.

The image of Sims’s earliest speculum in the printed book—quite different from what the Sims speculum would soon become, and which is still used today—also appears in his 1852 paper.

“On the Treatment of Vesico-Vaginal Fistula,” J. Marion Sims, The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, Vol. XXIII, 1852, pp. 60, 65.