SIMS
daughter of William J. Forbes, and had
seven children.
Atkinson's Phys. and^Surgs. of tlie United
States.
The relation of Yale to Medicine. W. II.
Welch, Yalo Med. Jour., Nov., 1901.
Sims, James Marion (1S13-1883).
James Marion Sims was on his father's side English, on his mother's of Scotch- Irish descent. His paternal grandfather, John Sims, was born December 27, 1790, and married Mahala Mackey in 1812. Of the father, his distinguished son left a record that "he was one of the best of men and best of husbands." He was sheriff of Lancaster County, South Caro- lina, from 1830-1834. His mother was the daughter of that Lydia Mackey, wife of Charles Mackey, a revolutionary soldier, who having been taken within the British lines, was tried by court- martial and sentenced to death as a spy by Col. Tarleton, and she successfully interceded with this British officer for the commutation of the death sentence, and ultimately obtained her husband's liberty.
Marion Sims was born in Lancaster District, South Carolina, January 25, 1813. He attended the common schools there, entered the Franklin Academy in 1825, and later was sent to the South Carolina College at Columbia, from which he graduated in December, 1832. Speak- ing of himself at this time he says:
" I never was remarkable for anything while I was in college except good be- havior. Nobody ever expected any- thing of me, and I never expected any- thing of myself." What a mistake of the youth concerning the man who was to achieve the greatest reputation ever accorded to an American surgeon.
On the twelfth of November, 1833, he matriculated at the Charleston Medical School, where he attended lectures for one year, and in 1834 became a student at Jefferson ]\Iedical College, Philadel- phia, from which he graduated in 1835. In May of that year he settled as a practitioner in Lancaster, but after a
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short period of discouragement removed in the fall of 1835 to Mount Meigs, Mont- gomery County, Alabama, where he was soon recognized as a clever doctor. While living here he volunteered in the Seminole War and in an expedition against the Creek Indians. Returning from this public service, and ambitious for a larger field, he established himself in Montgomery, the capital of the State, in December, 1840.
The boldness and success of his opera- tions in general surgery soon attracted a large client^e, which encouraged him to establish a private hospital, and within a few years he startled the professional world by the announcement of the cure, by an original method, of a series of cases of vesi CO- vaginal fistula. Up to that time there was not an authenticated successful treatment for this important surgical lesion, and when the science of obstetrics was in its infancy, there were thousands of women who, as a result of unskillful attendance in childbirth, were left in the most deplorable and loathsome condition by reason of injuries to the bladder; they were, in fact, among the most wretched and pitable of human beings, and attracted the sympathy and attention of the enterprising young surgeon. He sought out a number of these helpless women, gave them shelter and free treatment in his hospital, and after several years of patient, anxious and persistent effort, finally succeeded in curing them. In the evolution of this operation he invented the silver-wire suture and the duck-bill speculum, the announcement of these successful cases attracting world-wide attention, and in many quarters being received with incredulity.
The invention of the speculum came about in this way: Early one morning in 1845, a countrywoman riding on horse-back into Montgomery was thrown from her horse and suffered a displace- ment of the uterus. Sims was called to see her, and found her in bed complain- ing of great pain in her back and a sense of tenesmus in both bladder and rectum.
