Architect of the Vagina

Thomas Addis Emmett, Sims’s disciple, rival, and colleague, and his successor as chief surgeon at the Woman’s Hospital in New York City, called Sims the “father” of American gynecology, and Sims’s only medical book, Clinical Notes, “the turning point of modern gynecology.” T.Gaillard Thomas, like Emmett a world-renowned gynecological surgeon, said at Sims’s death: “If all that Sims has done for gynecology were suppressed we should find that we had retrograded at least a quarter of a century…. If I were called upon to name the three men who in the history of all times had done most for their fellow men, I would say George Washington, William Jenner, and Marion Sims.” One twentieth-century historian calls Sims the “Architect of the Vagina.” Sims experimented with artificial insemination and performed numerous operations to cure sterility in women. ¹