Page 173
“…his vision began to grow…”
See “…a hospital devoted to the maladies of women,” above.
Although Sims consistently denied that opening a hospital was his reason for going to New York, I think the calendar and the context betrays him. Sims’s moved to New York full time in the fall of 1853 (he left Alabama earlier, by most accounts, but summered in Connecticut), and by April 1854, about six months later, he was delivering a lecture to propose his hospital. This came after an extended period of having bounced the idea off of a number of surgeons in New York, as will be described later. Furthermore, one of the first things Sims did when his hospital opened—again, as will be documented in future chapters—was propose doing cancer surgeries in addition to fistula work. Sims’s version of these events does not make chronological sense, and given the fact that he had just recently experimented with silver wire—and had the thought that silver would make abdominal surgery possible—it’s far more likely that, like other doctors he knew of (Nott, LeVert), he had already envisioned a hospital that would quickly branch out from fistula to all kinds of surgeries. Indeed, the tension between fistula and cancer work would be the thing that would eventually result in his ouster from Woman’s Hospital.
“…P.T. Barnum.”
Although Sims bragged of friendship with Barnum, not much has been made of the fact that Sims met Barnum after his initial fistula “success,” but before he published about it. As will be seen shortly, I think it’s likely that Sims would have heard of Barnum, and would have been aware that Barnum made his name by exploiting the body of an enslaved woman, just as Sims was attempting to do.
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 258.