Early Career
Sims was born in Hanging Rock, South Carolina, the son of John and Mahala Mackey Sims. Sims's family spent the first twelve years of his life in the Heath Springs area of Lancaster County. He would later write entertainingly of his early school days, but recalled one occasion when he was saved from drowning by fourteen-year-old Arthur Ingram, who lived south of Hanging Rock Creek.
His father, John Sims, was elected sheriff of Lancaster County in 1825 and thereafter took up residence in Lancaster, where the boy, Marion, entered Franklin Academy.
After two years of study at the South Carolina College in Columbia, Sims worked with Dr. Churchill Jones in Lancaster, South Carolina, and took a three-month course at the Medical College of Charleston. He then moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and enrolled at the Jefferson Medical College where he graduated in 1835. He returned to Lancaster to practice, but after the deaths of his first two patients moved to Alabama.
He returned to Lancaster in 1836 to marry the daughter of Dr. Barlett Jones, Theresa, with whom he had fallen in love while studying at South Carolina College in Columbia. They would return to Alabama together, where in 1845, Marion Sims established a private hospital for women.
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