Here we have a capital French story:
“Old Languet, the celebrated Curé of St. Sulpice, was remarkable and disagreeable for the importunity with which he solicited subscriptions for finishing his church, which is not yet finished. One day at supper, where Cardinal de Fleury was, he happened to say that he had seen his Eminence’s portrait at some painter’s. The old Cardinal, who was stingy in private as well as economical in public expenditure, was glad to raise a laugh at the troublesome old curé, and replied, ‘I dare swear, then, you asked it (the picture) to subscribe;’ ‘Oh, no, my Lord,’ said Languet, ‘it was too like!’”
The richness of the following situation could hardly be paralleled:
“Every one knows the story of a gentleman’s asking Lord North who ‘that frightful woman was?’ and his lordship’s answering, that is my wife. The other, to repair his blunder, said I did not mean her, but that monster next to her. ‘Oh,’ said Lord North, ‘that monster is my daughter.’ With this story Frederick Robinson, in his usual absent enthusiastic way, was one day entertaining a lady whom he sat next to at dinner, and lo! the lady was Lady Charlotte Lindsay—the monster in question.”
These chance excerpts (and just as good things lie scattered on every page, so as to make a veritable embarras des richesses), indicate the character of the book, and how amply it will repay, both for pleasure and instruction, the reader who sits down to peruse it. Few works of recent times are so compact and meaty in just those qualities which make a work valuable alike for reference and continuous perusal.
The Story of My Life. By J. Marion Sims, M.D., L.L.D.. Edited by his son, H. Marion Sims, M.D. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
The great name of Dr. Marion Sims in gynæcology, or the treatment of women’s diseases, has never been equalled in the same line in America, and the story of his life related in language of the plainest homespun is quite a fascinating record. Dr. Sims has several titles to fame, which we think will secure the perpetuity of his name in the annals of surgery and medicine. These are: his treatment and care of vesico-vaginal fistula, a most loathsome disease, before deemed incurable; his invention of the speculum; his exposition of the true pathology and method of treatment of trismus nascentium, or the lockjaw of infants; and the fact that he was the founder and organizer of “The Woman’s Hospital, of the State of New York,” the first institution ever endowed exclusively for the treatment of women’s diseases.
J. Marion Sims was a native of Alabama, and was educated academically in the Charleston College. His account of his early struggles for an education (for though born of a well-to-do family, money was not over plenty in his father’s home), is very entertaining, and the anecdotes of his juvenile life among a people full of idiosyncracies, are marked by humor and point. His medical education was completed at Jefferson College, Philadelphia, an institution which, ranking very high to-day, had no rival in the country half a century since. It is to be observed that Dr. Sims has a very graphic and simple method of telling his story, showing a genuine mastery of the fundamental idea of good writing, though he is always without pretence, and takes occasion from time to time to deplore his own faults as a literary worker. Yet no contributions to medical literature, aside from their intrinsic value have been more admired than his for their simple, clear force, and luminous treatment. After practising for several years as a country doctor, our great embryo surgeon moved to the city of Montgomery and began to devote himself more exclusively to operative surgery, the branch in which his talents so palpably ran. It was at Montgomery that he became specially interested in women’s diseases, and began to experiment on methods of treating one of the most loathsome and hitherto incurable diseases, which afflict woman, vesico-vaginal fistula, a trouble so often produced by childbirth. Dr. Sims practised on slave women, and turned his house and yard into a veritable hospital, spending a large part of his income in his enthusiastic devotion to the great discovery on the track of which he was moving. At last, he perfected the method of the operation, and made peculiar instruments for it. What had been impossible, he now performed with almost unerring certainty, and rarely lost a case. This became heralded abroad, and the name of Dr. Sims was discussed in New York and Philadelphia, as one who had made one of the most extraordinary discoveries in operative surgery.
His own health had been bad for years; and, as a Southern climate did not agree with him, he went to New York to live in 1852. Though at first he had a hard struggle, he fought his way with the same rugged pertinacity which he had previously shown. He was assailed with the bitterest professional jealousies, but, nothing daunted him, and he finally succeeded in founding his woman’s hospital, through the help of the wealthy and generous women of New York. His great discovery was attempted to be stolen from him by his envious rivals, but he had no trouble in establishing his right to the glory. He overbore all the opposition made against him, and settled his own reputation as one of the greatest surgeons of this or any age. In 1861, when the war broke out, Dr. Sims, who was strong in his secession sympathies, determined to take his family to Europe, so bitter was the feeling against him in New York. He went to Paris, and in a very short time his remarkable and original method of treating vesico-vaginal fistula, by means of silver sutures, gave him a European reputation, and honors were showered on him from all sides. The great surgeons of Europe freely credited him with the glory of having struck out an entirely new and splendid path in surgery, and his operations in the leading hospitals of Paris, London, Brussels and Berlin, were always brilliant ovations, always attended by the most prominent men in the profession, and a swarm of enthusiastic students. He also secured a very lucrative private practice, and performed cures which were heralded as phenomenal in medical books and journals. At different times he was the physician of the Empress of the French, of the Queen of England, and of other royal and distinguished personages. Patients came to him from the most distant quarters, and though a large portion of his time was given to hospital practice, his fees were very large and lucrative. His fame was now established on a secure basis, and the greatest men in Europe freely acknowledged in Dr. Sims their peer. Though the most seductive offers were made to him, to settle permanently both in London and Paris, his heart was among his own countrymen. So at the close of the war he returned to New York. His most important work thenceforward was in connection with the Woman’s Hospital, though he treated innumerable private cases among the wealthy classes. The memoir proper ends with his Parisian career, and the rest of Dr. Sims’s life is told in the preface. He died in 1883, and so indomitable was his professional devotion, that he took notes and memoranda of his own disease up to a brief period before death. The life of Dr. Sims, while interesting to the general reader, will be found peculiarly valuable and attractive by professional men. A large portion of the book is given to a detailed description of the various steps which he took in experimenting on vesico-vaginal fistula, and of the difficulties which he so patiently and at last so triumphantly surmounted. In addition to his professional greatness, Dr. Sims was greatly beloved for the virtues of his private life. He was in the latter years a most sincere and devout Christian, and succeeded in avoiding that taint of scepticism, which so often shows itself in the medical fraternity.