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SIR JAMES SIMPSON

The state of the healing art at Simpson’s birth—Birthplace—Family superstitions—His father’s bakery—His mother’s Huguenot descent—Commencement of schooldays—Natural and antiquarian features of Bathgate district—The village hand-loom weavers as antiquarians and naturalists—His interest in Nature and craving for knowledge—Brothers’ and sister’s care for him—Size of his head—Village doctor’s record of his birth—Schooldays cease at age of fourteen—Influence of his environment in developing his character.

James Young Simpson, who will ever be remembered as the discoverer of the pain-annulling power of chloroform, was born in the year 1811, at a period when there was room for a hero in the practice of the healing art in the British Islands.

It is true that in the seventeenth century Harvey had laid bare the great fact of the circulation of the blood and the practical Thomas Sydenham had swept aside the highly empirical systems and theories 2 of medicine which had successively supplanted each other since Hippocrates first taught, and urged men to found their knowledge upon what they actually saw—on observation and experiment; and that in the eighteenth century men like Cheyne, Heberden, Cullen, and the wonderful Jenner had appreciably assisted in developing medicine at the same time that Hunter was raising surgery nearer to the level of a science. But even while Simpson was growing out of childhood all the powers of such professional giants as Bright, Addison, Abernethy, Astley Cooper, and Charles Bell, were insufficient to dispel the massive cloud of mystery and superstition which enveloped the practice of both medicine and surgery in this country and obscured whatever there was of truth in the teaching of these men.

In the first decade or two of this century the medical profession had not yet entirely abandoned the use of the golden-headed cane, nor had what Oliver Wendell Holmes calls the solemn farce of overdrugging yet ceased. “Humours,” “impostumes,” “iliac passions,” and such like were still spoken of—terms now heard only amongst country-folks in remote districts and that rarely, or encountered in curious old medical publications. Messes and abominations, prepared by the apothecaries according to more or less secret recipes handed down through the Middle Ages, were swallowed in good faith; blood-letting was still a panacea; and such remedies as that of holding a live puppy to the 3 body for the relief of colic still had their professional advocates, but happily a decreasing number; whilst those pains

—pains which Simpson was the first truly to relieve by his application of anæsthetics, were gravely said to be alleviated by the swallowing of a concoction of white onions and oil. Surgery was no doubt ahead of medicine; but the early surgical records of this century have little more than a curious interest to modern practitioners. Operations entirely unknown to our professional forefathers less than a century ago are now performed in safety daily. Such mysterious diseases as “icteric irritative fever” and “acute sinking” after operations, dreaded then with the fear that is always inspired by unseen or ill-understood dangers, have vanished before the progress of modern science in which the introduction of anæsthesia was the first great step.

The practice of the branch of medicine which Simpson made so peculiarly his own—that of obstetrics—originally in the hands of women only, had been fiercely contested for by the two sexes during two centuries, and such was the feeling against man-midwives in Scotland that the dispute had scarcely ceased at Simpson’s birth. The stronger sex, however, 4 was then at last asserting its superiority, and to be an accoucheur was beginning to be considered after all as worthy of a gentleman. The despised art was preparing for its renaissance.

Simpson grew to manhood whilst science, aided by precise methods of accurate observation, was shedding new light upon physic, surgery, and obstetrics. In fulfilling his great part in establishing the healing art on a firm scientific basis, Simpson encountered the full force of the ignorance and prejudice of his day both within and without his profession. It was, perhaps, fortunate that he was brought up in a small village and in a rank of life where he would meet from his earliest days with many superstitious beliefs and