The Sentimental Physician: J. Marion Sims’s Story of My Life

Abstract

The career of Dr. J. Marion Sims, considered the “father of modern gynecology,” culminated with his autobiography. Story of My Life signals the interdependency of American medicine and nineteenth-century print culture, which furthered the demand for physicians’ life narratives. Published posthumously in 1884, Sims’s autobiography is informed by abolitionist sensationalism and sentimentality. Though his work depended on the exploitation and labour of enslaved women, Sims represents himself and his patients sentimentally, in ways that dismiss his culpability in the violence of slavery while legitimizing his authorial voice. By examining how medicine and sentiment intersect within Sims’s autobiography, this paper demonstrates how Sims’s performative affect, together with nineteenth-century sexual and racial politics, granted him unmitigated access to enslaved women’s bodies. The rhetoric of sentimentality deployed in Story of My Life functions to secure Sims’s authority and innocence as a benevolent physician, erasing the labour and embodied experience of the enslaved women he experimented on.