User:Montygordon/sandbox

Sims began his operations on three enslaved Africans--Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsy--in 1845 in Montgomery, Alabama, where he had recently moved, far from the medical centers in the big cities. According to the Columbia Encyclopedia the first use of ether came after a demonstration at Mass. General in Boston in 1846, and the first use of a general anesthetic in obstetrics was in 1847, two years after Sims began his effort to cure the three unfortunate young women of vesico-vaginal fistula.

In his autobiography The Story of My Life, he tells of three plantation owners bringing him the unfortunate girls for treatment. Sims turned the owners down because he did not feel he was qualified or sufficiently experienced. Then a white woman in the neighborhood suffered a riding accident that displaced her uterus. Sims describes how he accidentally and rather easily corrected the problem, and in the process saw a possible cure for the three young girls, whose affliction promised them a miserable life as pariahs and outcasts unless they could be cured. Thus he proceeded. The young women were heroic beyond belief, and when they were finally cured, as we have been told, they became aides to Sims in his operations on other unfortunate women.

Sims' role in New York, where he moved with his family soon after because of poor health, which he suffered from on and off all his life, was largely in the promotion of, and fund raising for, additional hospitals for women, and of course, demonstrating for other surgeons his technique in curing vesico-vaginal fistulas.

He was a southerner by birth and temperament, and owned domestic slaves while in the south--which he and his wife freed when they moved to New York--and sympathized with the Confederacy and moved to Europe during the war. But he left medical achievements and contributions of lasting importance.