Page 168
“February 14, 1854…”
Emmet, T. A. (1911). Incidents of my life: Professional, literary, social; with services in the cause of Ireland. New York, Putnam, p. 158.
“…the letter confirming the date…”
Emmet, T. A. (1911). Incidents of my life: Professional, literary, social; with services in the cause of Ireland. New York, Putnam, p. 158.
“…his Fulton Street tailor…”
Emmet, T. A. (1911). Incidents of my life: Professional, literary, social; with services in the cause of Ireland. New York, Putnam, p. 158.
“…the evening of February 13.”
Emmet, T. A. (1911). Incidents of my life: Professional, literary, social; with services in the cause of Ireland. New York, Putnam, p. 158.
“…the home of Dr. Nathan Harris.”
Emmet, T. A. (1911). Incidents of my life: Professional, literary, social; with services in the cause of Ireland. New York, Putnam, p. 158.
“Did Emmet recall…”
I have contrived a moment for Emmet to encounter Anarcha, but it’s highly likely that Emmet would have sought her out while staying at Harris’s home. As will be detailed later, Sims was vociferous in his pursuit of attention in New York after he arrived. The plan for a hospital was already underway, and he was actively seeking out cases of VVF in the city. The date of his lecture, establishing Woman’s Hospital, would soon be set, and he was bouncing from doctor to doctor, looking for supporters. It is surely the case that Emmet—although he was still unaware that he would become Sims’s assistant—would have had a more than passing interest in seeing Anarcha for himself. It’s probably even likely—though I resisted the impulse to include it—that Emmet would have seized on the chance to perform an examination of her himself.
“…additional rumors about Sims…”
The full details of Sims’s early life in New York are more fully documented in later chapters.
“…at last found a fistula case…”
“A Memoir of Dr. James Marion Sims,” Thomas Addis Emmet, The New York Medical Journal, January 5, 1884, pp. 1-2.
“…a hero of American medicine…”
Barker’s article was published four months after Emmet’s wedding.
“John Bull vs. French Therapeutics. Young America vs. British Surgery,” Fordyce Barker, The American Medical Monthly, June 1854, p. 462.
