Some time after coming up north from Alabama, people took to calling Dr J. Marion Sims "Sir Galahad in Manhattan". A ridiculous notion to him, but as a pioneer surgeon of the 19th century, his work with women's diseases, those who thought they were barren, helping those who were too poor to get help when their babies came, or those who would have died from childbed fever, it became his mission to found the first women's hospital in America.