Dr. J. Marion Sims

  • Sculptor: Ferdinand von Miller II
  • Pedestal: Aymar Embury II
  • Dedicated: 1892
  • Medium and size: Overall 12.5 feet. Bronze (8.75 feet), granite pedestal (approximately 9 feet)
  • Former location: Central Park at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street, across from the Academy of Medicine; soon to be placed in the Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn.

  • Ferdinand von Miller II , Dr. J. Marion Sims, 1892. Formerly Central Park, New York; soon Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn. Photo copyright © 2018 Dianne L. Durante
  • Miller, Sims, 1892. Photo copyright © 2018 Dianne L. Durante

As Good as It Used to Get

Above: In this painting by Winthrop Chandler of Dr. William Clysson (ca. 1780), the physician does a check-up on a woman by taking her pulse – while the rest of her body remains discreetly hidden by the bed curtains. If Mrs. George  Washington, Mrs. Alexander Hamilton, or Mrs. Thomas Jefferson got sick, this is most likely the sort of treatment they’d have received.

Above: It was considered less erotic to touch than to see. Well into the 19th century, physicians were allowed to feel but not look.

If you self-diagnosed a “female complaint,” there were of course remedies!

Above: Bonnore’s Electro Magnetic Bathing Fluid, a cure for Neuralgia, Cholera, Rheumaticsm, Paralysis, Hip Disease, Measles, Female Complaints, Necrosis, Chronic Abcesses, Mercurial Eruptions, Epilepsy, and Scarlet Fever.

Above: “Philotoken or Female’s Friend, Warranted co cure painful menstruation, and to relieve and control Histeria, Nausea, and all Nervous irregularities, especially while enciente.” (“Enceinte” means pregnant.)

Sims’s Importance

From a biography of Sims:

In the early 1880s it was a rare person indeed who had not heard of Sims. Not only was he one of America’s most famous physicians: he was an international legend, a controversial cosmopolite whose ability to blaze new trails and to effect remarkable cures kept him almost constantly in the limelight and brought him hordes of friends, not a few enemies, and a fabulous income wherever he went – which was practically everywhere. … [Sims] was the physician who brought new hope and new life to women, the surgeon who, more than any other, dispelled the age-old fatalistic belief that it was God’s will for countless wives and mothers to go to an early grave or to suffer lifelong invalidism. — Seale Harris, Woman’s Surgeon (1950), pp. xv-xvi

November 12, 1883: Dr. J. Marion Sims’ Legacy to Cancer Patients

When he died in 1883, Dr. J. Marion Sims was recognized as the founder of modern gynecology, a surgeon who saved thousands of women’s lives at a time when they routinely suffered and died from mysterious “women’s complaints.” Yet one of Sims’ most lasting legacies came not from his own work, but from a project that prospered because he threw the weight of his reputation behind it, just before he died.

 In 1906 an expert on cancer wrote, “Some of the older surgeons of even the present time say they have never seen a case of cure of cancer.” The causes of cancer were completely unknown – hypotheses ranged from germs to heredity to stress to industrial civilization. Hospitals were reluctant to admit cancer patients, who were often considered morally deficient and likely to spread the disease. Known treatments were painful, disfiguring and largely ineffective. Those who had terminal cancer suffered and died in agony, without even alleviation of their pain.

 In October 1883, in a letter to a friend whose offer to fund a cancer pavilion at the Woman’s Hospital had been rejected, Sims suggested the establishment of an independent hospital solely for cancer patients. Such a recommendation, coming from a man of Sims’ fame and reputation, carried weight with the medical establishment. In early 1884, a few months after Sims died, the cornerstone was laid for the New York Cancer Hospital’s Astor pavilion, dedicated to the treatment of cancer in women. It was the first such hospital in the United States, and one of only a handful in the world.

More