Page 226

“…Reverend McAlpin…”

“Nathan Bozeman,” Emmet B. Carmichael, Alabama Journal of Medicine and Science, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1969, p. 233.

“He studied medicine in Kentucky…”

“Nathan Bozeman,” Emmet B. Carmichael, Alabama Journal of Medicine and Science, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1969, p. 233.

“…his thesis…”

“Nathan Bozeman,” Emmet B. Carmichael, Alabama Journal of Medicine and Science, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1969, p. 233.

“…delivered the anesthesia…”

Bozeman wrote a letter to the editor of the Medical Record to establish these facts. Medical Record, June 7, 1879, pp. 549-50.

“…Silbey…”

The will of Nathan Bozeman Sr. is held at the UAB Archives, University of Alabama, Birmingham, in Birmingham, Alabama.

“…Claresy…”

The will of Nathan Bozeman Sr. is held at the UAB Archives, University of Alabama, Birmingham, in Birmingham, Alabama.

“…Ester…”

The will of Nathan Bozeman Sr. is held at the UAB Archives, University of Alabama, Birmingham, in Birmingham, Alabama.

“…Lucy.”

The will of Nathan Bozeman Sr. is held at the UAB Archives, University of Alabama, Birmingham, in Birmingham, Alabama.

“Dick, Nancy, Tam, and Harry…”

The will of Nathan Bozeman Sr. is held at the UAB Archives, University of Alabama, Birmingham, in Birmingham, Alabama.

“Bozeman was left cows…”

The will of Nathan Bozeman Sr. is held at the UAB Archives, University of Alabama, Birmingham, in Birmingham, Alabama.

“In 1849…”

Bozeman, N. (1884). History of the clamp suture of the late Dr. J. Marion Sims, and why it was abandoned by the profession, p. 3, ft.

“…a poor steward of money…”

See “…R.G. Dun credit investigators…,” above.

“…he was hostile…”

See “…to advertise their services,” above.

“…the clinical assistance of the slave women…”

See “…a serious word,” above.

“…the physicians of Montgomery had left him.”

See “…an utterly foolhardy quest,” above.

“…to sacrifice honor…”

Sims’s biographer, Seale Harris, wrote of “whispers” of concern over Sims’s experiments, without citation. I am going a little further than this in reading between the lines of mysterious statements that William O. Baldwin made about feuding with Sims many years after Baldwin criticized Sims’s lockjaw work (see “…condemning Sims’s lockjaw cure,” and “…the subject of local gossip,” above)—and after Sims had died. The nature of Baldwin’s feud with Sims was never made fully clear, but after Sims became famous the men reconciled and Sims wrote on behalf of Baldwin’s work on quinine. Baldwin would not have been inclined to insult Sims’s legacy, yet he felt compelled to take note of the three-decade-long feud anyway.

“Sketches and Reminiscences of the Life of Dr. J. Marion Sims,” William O. Baldwin, first delivered as a speech at a memorial meeting of the Medical and Surgical Society of Montgomery, and subsequently published in the Montgomery Advertiser. The speech was included as an appendix in Sims’s autobiography, pp. 430, 439.

“…all the women that were supposed to have been cured…”

Bozeman’s 1884 paper about the history of Sims’s clamp suture—published as an insult less than a year after Sims died—revealed that Bozeman never encountered Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, or any of the other women who were part of Sims’s initial experiments. Bozeman’s description of the three enslaved women’s fistulae stands in stark contrast to the description that Sims would provide in his autobiography, published posthumously a year later (see “…the smell of gas and waste…,” above).

Bozeman, N. (1884). History of the clamp suture of the late Dr. J. Marion Sims, and why it was abandoned by the profession, p. 19.

“Sims was duly impressed…”

Neither Sims nor Bozeman offered a candid description of their initial meeting. Long before either of them wrote about the other, they had been feuding for decades. Sims eventually refused to speak or write Bozeman’s name, and Bozeman spoke of Sims with a tone of barely concealed angst and anger. I have chosen to characterize this earliest meeting with hints of the fissures that would eventually form in the relationship.