City Directories and History: On the NE corner of Main and Arch Streets was the Kibbler House, the home of Sheriff John Sims, who was the father of Dr. J. Marion Sims. After Sheriff Sims, B. F. Sadler operated a hotel in the house. It is believed that the first issues of the Lancaster Ledger were published in the Kibbler house in 1852.
“After the deaths of two of his first patients, twenty-two-year-old J. Marion Sims despairingly threw his new shingle in the Lancasterville town well and left for Montgomery, Alabama. There he created surgical techniques and invented seventy-one instruments to aid women with childbirth problems. In 1853, he moved to New York and established the Woman’s Hospital of the State of New York and later established the Cancer Hospital, now known as Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He was the father of modem gynecology.
Sims was in New York when the Civil War broke out. In 1862, he got a pass to cross the Union lines and to visit his native Lancaster County. The next year he moved to France to be surgeon to Empress Eugenie. In France he became a wealthy man. After his return to New York in 1866, Dr. Sims generously sent food and money to the needy citizens of Lancaster County. He donated sixty acres of land to the county and enough money to equip a large building known as “The J. Marion Sims Asylum for the Poor.” The inscription on a large statue of Dr. J. Marion Sims (1813-1883) on New York City’s Fifth Avenue reads in part:
In recognition of his services in the cause of science and mankind he received the highest honors in the gift of his countrymen and decorations from the governments of France, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, and Italy.”
Photographic copy of engraving in J. Marion Sims’s The Story of My Life (New York, 1894) and Courtesy of the Lancaster County Pictorial History by Bishop and Pettus, 1984
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