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“…as her brother had suggested.”

See “…a serious word,” above.

“…a complete failure.”

Sims, J. M., & New York Academy of Medicine. (1858). Silver sutures in surgery. New York: S.S. & W. Wood, p. 58.

“…what they would do to the silk…”

Sims lists a number of explanations for the failures—for expedience, I have limited it to the one that was in keeping with silver wire as the solution.

Sims, J. M., & New York Academy of Medicine. (1858). Silver sutures in surgery. New York: S.S. & W. Wood, p. 58.

“The solution came at once.”

Sims is highly duplicitous in describing how it came to him that silver wire might make his procedure effective. He would have us believe that he studied the history of fistula surgery carefully, including those who had used wire sutures to cure fistulae before him, but that the idea of augmenting his own cure with metal suture material did not come to him until he stumbled across a bit of brass wire on the ground. In this way, Sims’s preserves the narrative that he conceived of metal wire as suture material all on his own, but gave a degree of credit to those who did it before him. He can’t have both, and I reject Sims’s version of the story. As others would later conclude, and as is described later in the book, Sims merely stole the solution from others, Henry LeVert most prominently.

Sims, J. M., & New York Academy of Medicine. (1858). Silver sutures in surgery. New York: S.S. & W. Wood, pp. 59-60.

“It was Anarcha’s turn…”

SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 245.

“…more and more adept at their jobs.”

See “…Dr. Sims’s young medical students struggled…,” above.

“…happy to see him fail.”

Harris is describing the Sims of just a years later. It’s important to remember that Harris was striving to put Sims in the best light possible.

Harris, S. (1950). Woman's surgeon: The life story of J. Marion Sims. New York: Macmillan, p. 123.

“It took his machinist a week…”

I’ve compressed the amount of time between procedures. Sims is not consistent from source to source, but the suggestion is that his regular practice interfered with his ability to immediately turn to the next experiment. The delay was not egregious.

SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 245.

“Anarcha hardly made a sound…”

See “…never moved or made a sound…,” above.

“…as neat a line as any skilled seamstress could produce.”

SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 245.

“No one had counted…”

See “…thirty experiments,” above.

“Anarcha climbed onto the table again…”

SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 246.