Sir James Young Simpson and Chloroform (1811-1870). H. Laing Gordon
Pilgrimage”; (10) “The Story of Edinburgh University,” by Sir A. Grant; (11) “The Life of Sir Robert Christison”; (12) “The Life of Robert Knox”; and numerous back numbers of the Century Magazine, the Lancet, the British Medical Journal, the Medical Times and Gazette, the Edinburgh Medical Journal, &c., &c.
Forest Hill, October, 1897.
1
SIR JAMES SIMPSON
CHAPTER I
Birth and Childhood. 1811–1825
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
“… In the hour,
When the veil of the body we feel
Rent round us—while torments reveal
The motherhood’s advent in power”
—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 practices, strange and utterly irrational. A mind such as his would meet, reason, and experiment these out of existence. Probably through these circumstances he conceived the taste for archæology and antiquarian research which were his recreation in later years; but, what was more important, he gained also some training for the struggle with ignorance, untruth, and irrationalism, into which he threw with his eager vigour the whole strength of his manhood.
Simpson was born in the village of Bathgate, in Linlithgowshire, where his father, David Simpson, was the local baker. David’s father, who died at the ripe age of ninety-one a few years after James’s birth, was the descendant of a line of small hard-working farmers, who added to his work and his profit the 5 practice of farriery. Although modern science has, by the aid of bacteriology, proved such practitioners of the rough veterinary medicine of the day to have been right in ascribing to unseen influences many of the diseases of animals which they found themselves powerless to check, the methods they employed for treatment when what they called witchcraft was at work scarcely have the support of present-day practitioners. In one of his addresses upon archæology Simpson records how his grandfather ordered and his own father took part in the burial alive of a cow in order to appease the evil spirit which was spreading the plague of murrain with fatal effect. And the older gentleman was known to have had more than one serious encounter with a witch. On one occasion an old beggar woman, who plied her calling in quite an original method—that of being wheeled in a barrow from farm to farm—hurled curses at old Simpson for ordering a servant to wheel her from his house on to her next calling-place, and vowed an awful vengeance on his family if he did not replace the servant with one of his stalwart sons. The farmer recollected that an ill event had followed the old woman’s last visit, and quickly drew a sharp flint from his pocket and made a gash across her forehead with it. “Ah,” he exclaimed, “I see what ye’re noo, ye auld witch; but I’ve scored ye aboon the braith and my house is safe.”
Simpson noted these and many other curious practices 6 and beliefs, and afterwards pointed out in one of his addresses that they were probably, for the most part, relics of the pagan creeds and customs of our ancestors. He urged the making of a collection of the folk-lore of Scotland, ere it utterly disappeared before the march of modern civilisation, and suggested that, perhaps, some archæological Cuvier might one day be able to re-construct from these mythological fragments distinct pictures of the heathen practices, rites, and faiths of our forefathers.
In his early boyhood he listened to many stories of local and family superstitions told to him with all the earnestness of a firm believer by his father. He himself was the object of superstitious admiration to the simple villagers all through his boyhood, and they freely foretold great deeds from him in later years; for he was a seventh son, and the good luck which seventh sons were supposed to bring had appeared in the family soon after his birth. Up to the day on which James first saw the light, June 7, 1811, the baker’s business had been going steadily from bad to worse, and the shop books showed that on that very day the lowest depths were reached. The baker, David Simpson, seems to have been curiously lacking in business method, although he was a hard-working man. But after James’s birth he wisely interested his wife in his affairs, with the result