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Sir James Young Simpson and Chloroform
(1811-1870)
BY H. LAING GORDON
LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
MDCCCXCVII
Copyright by T. Fisher Unwin, 1897, for Great Britain and Longmans
Green & Co. for the United States of America
MASTERS OF MEDICINE
EDITED BY ERNEST HART, D.C.L
"HOMINES AD DEOS NULLA IN RE
PROPIUS ACCEDUNT QUAM
SALUTEM HOMINIBUS DANDO."
CICERO.
Title. Author.
JOHN HUNTER _Stephen Paget_
WILLIAM HARVEY _D'arcy Power_
SIR JAMES SIMPSON _H. Laing Gordon_
EDWARD JENNER _Ernest Hart_
HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ _John G. McKendrick_
WILLIAM STOKES _Sir William Stokes_
CLAUDE BERNARD _Michael Foster_
SIR BENJAMIN BRODIE _Timothy Holmes_
THOMAS SYDENHAM _J. F. Payne_
VESALIUS _C. Louis Taylor_
[Illustration: J. Simpson]
To PROFESSOR ALEXANDER RUSSELL SIMPSON
"Him by the hand dear Nature took,
Dearest Nature, strong and kind."
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
"When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it."
_Id._
PREFACE
I have endeavoured to condense the vast amount of matter which has
been written concerning this Master of Medicine and his work into the
form of a readable narrative, and to represent him in his social and
intellectual environment in accordance with the object of this Series.
The selections from his own writings illustrate as far as possible his
versatility and many-sided character. I have chosen for quotation out
of the numerous sketches and memoirs of him those written from
undoubted knowledge of the man.
I am indebted especially to Professor A. R. Simpson for kind advice,
to Mr. Cuthbertson of the Edinburgh University Library for useful
help, to Mr. C. Louis Taylor for valuable criticism, and to my wife
for assistance in research and compilation. I have also to thank those
friends who from time to time have favoured me with personal
reminiscences of Sir James.
The following are the chief works, in addition to Simpson's own
writings, from which my information has been drawn:--(1) "The Jubilee
of Anaesthetic Midwifery"; (2) "Keiller and Crede"; (3) "History of the
Chair of Midwifery in the University of Edinburgh," being addresses by
Professor A. R. Simpson; (4) Miss Eve B. Simpson's "Sir James
Simpson"; and her (5) "Dogs of other Days;" (6) "Twenty Years and
their Lesson; a Retrospect and Review" (_Scots Observer_, 1891); (7)
Dr. Duns's "Memoir of Sir J. Y. Simpson"; (8) Professor Gusserow's
"Zur Erinnerung an Sir J. Y. Simpson"; (9) Mr. Cuthbertson's
"Student's 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_.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE.
I. Birth and Childhood. (1811-1825) 1
II. Student Days. (1825-1830) 17
III Further Studies. (1830-1835) 36
IV. Early Practice and Professorship. (1835-1840) 52
V. Professor and Physician. (1840-1847) 66
VI. The Discovery of Anaesthetics. (1844-1847) 88
VII. The Fight for Anaesthesia. 1847 onwards 111
VIII. Home Life--Controversies 133
IX. Archaeology--Practice 152
X. Personal--Professorial--Professional 164
XI. Further Reforms--Honours 186
XII. Failing Health--Death 202
Appendix 223
Index 227
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 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
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 anaesthetics, 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
anaesthesia 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, 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 archaeology 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 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 archaeology 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 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 archaeological 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 that she
energetically and successfully bestirred herself to recoup their
fallen fortunes. Mrs. Simpson was directly descended from a fugitive
Huguenot family, settled for many years on a farm near Bathgate, and
intermarried with well-known families. Through her, indeed, Simpson
claimed a distant relationship with the national hero, Sir William
Wallace. The cares of her family and the strain of managing the
increasing baker's business proved too much for her always delicate
constitution, and she died when James was only nine years old. There
is no doubt that the youngest child and favourite son had an unusually
large share of his mother's society during those years; he was a
peculiarly attractive child, "a rosy bairn wi' laughin' mou' and
dimpled cheeks," and his manner, even when he was little more than an
infant, was quiet and affectionate. When physical sufferings overtook
the mother, the child's quiet sympathy and engaging manner helped and
comforted her. Her own nature was bright, vivacious, and energetic,
quick to think and prompt to act; and she was full of love, sympathy,
and piety. These maternal traits influenced the youth, and added a
soft, refined--delicately refined--tone to the paternal influence,
whence he received self-reliance and habits of persevering industry.
The boy's school-life began at the age of four years. The orthodox
learning came very easily to him; he entered into both work and play
so whole-heartedly that he at once became known as the "wise wean,"
and was at the same time ever sought after by his school-mates as a
companion in out-door sports. The parish schoolmaster was one James
Taylor, who had considerable ability for the post, and encouraged his
pupils by kindly personal interest to develop affection for learning.
But for Simpson there were other teachers and greater subjects for
study in the countryside around Bathgate. The district was full of
rich treasures for the field naturalist and for the antiquarian.
Bathgate lies between the Firth of Forth and the Pentland Hills, in a
geologically varied district, with a varied and abundant flora and
fauna--more so in those days when Bathgate was a small village of
hand-loom weavers than latterly, when it was a thriving little town,
the centre of a coal, shale, and ironstone mining industry. The
archaeological features of the neighbourhood were full of interest.
There was the famous "Catstane," of Kirkliston, which had puzzled
antiquarians even before the establishment of the Scots Society in
1780, and at Kipps was one of the few remaining cromlechs--and that a
ruined one--in Scotland; whilst the line of the Roman wall between the
Firth of Forth and the Clyde was not far distant. There were traces of
a Cistercian monastery founded by David I., and various hills and
fields and caves were associated with the names of Sir William
Wallace, Robert Bruce, and King Edward I.
Simpson thoroughly familiarised himself in boyhood with the natural
features, as well as with the antiquarian objects in the district.
He continued to investigate them during his vacations when a student
at Edinburgh University, and rendered the neighbourhood famous
archaeologically by masterly monographs written when he was at the
height of his fame. Amongst the village hand-loom weavers, a race
of peculiarly observant and intelligent men, there were some who
studied both the antiquarian objects and the natural history of
Linlithgowshire. Simpson used to speak of one man, a daily labourer
at the loom, who was able to write, in correct Latin, an accurate
description of any plant or animal brought before him, although
his earnings at the loom never amounted to fifty pounds a year.
These men thoroughly enjoyed the evident interest of the "young
philosopher" in their discussions and demonstrations, at the same
time kindly directing his mind towards the simple, painstaking, true
methods of observing and reflecting upon nature. There was no lack
of change in his environment for him; his interest in natural
phenomena was roused and kept alive during his drives round the
countryside delivering bread to the farmers and cottagers, or in
occasional visits to his parents' relations. He daily took his turn
behind the shop counter, reading, writing, or drawing in the
interval of waiting for customers. He trained himself to read or
do his school lessons as readily in a roomful of romping children
as in the quiet of the bedroom. It has been said that he never knew
an idle moment from the day of his birth onwards, and his was such
an indomitable and persevering energy that the remark is no
exaggeration. But the pathway to greatness was made specially smooth
for James Simpson. He was set upon it, and protected in his
childhood, and guided in his youth, with the one definite object
always in view. The Simpson family as well as the whole Bathgate
community, took it for granted that eminence was to be his in
whatever walk of life he entered seriously upon. His sister Mary and
his brother Alexander looked upon him as a special care; the former
watched over him as a mother, and the latter helped him in the ups
and downs of boyhood, just as he constantly stood by him throughout
the difficult days of his later career. It had always been a
custom in Scots families of humble rank that one child, either from
the exhibition of a natural aptitude, or through the ambition of
the parents, was singled out to receive the advantages of a fuller
education such as is within the reach of every able lad in Scotland.
Honour and glory would thus be brought to the family, greatest of
all if from the pulpit, while the less favoured members of the family
would plod on in the same sphere of life as their parents. The world
owes a great deal to the Simpsons, and particularly to Alexander, who
cheerfully seconded their father's efforts to help forward their
young brother, without a suspicion of jealousy. They knew he would
be great some day, and therein they looked for their reward.
Happily there were ample means for all their requirements derived from
the now prosperous bakery. The money was kept in one drawer, the till
where the shop earnings were placed. All the household were free to
draw thence supplies for their ordinary wants, James without stint;
and he alone was exempted from the condition that he who profited must
also contribute by the sweat of his brow. The boy took very full
advantage of his fortunate circumstances and drank deeply of all the
knowledge that came near and ever hunted for more. With each
succeeding year the craving to know, and to know thoroughly, became
more and more his ruling passion; by the time his schooldays were over
it had gained complete mastery over him; happily for the human race
Providence had so endowed him that when knowledge had come wisdom did
not linger.
He was never in any way led away by the temptations that no doubt
beset every boy in a village of hard-drinkers such as Bathgate was in
his youth. Alexander took pains to warn him--"Others may do this,
Jamie, but it would break all our hearts and blast all your prospects
were you to do it," he said. It was not necessary to make appeals to
James to work and fulfil the family predictions; he was as firmly
determined to be great as they were sure he would be: He never forgot
how much he owed to the loving help of his family, and to the fact
that he was the youngest son growing up at a time when the family
struggles were fairly over; when instead of its being an effort for
the parents to provide the necessary funds for his education, the
shop-till was well filled and the elder brothers and the loving sister
were at hand eagerly willing to help. In student days when struggles
came and the path seemed dark and beset with dangers, the knowledge of
the firm faith in his powers of the family at home and of the scarcely
smaller faith of the weavers, was a powerful incentive in the moments
when he required any other than that of the spirit within him.
We cannot feel otherwise than thankful that up to the age of fourteen,
when his schooldays ended, he had access to but a limited stock of
literature wherewith to gratify his hunger for knowledge. To satisfy
his appetite he was driven into the fields and the forests; every
sense was stimulated, and became developed through repeated use. Thus
he laid the foundation of his phenomenal faculty of rapid and accurate
observation, and of his no less phenomenal memory.
His imagination was fed with the legends of the district and tales of
his remote moss-trooper ancestors told to him of an evening by his
father. Though happily saved from being a bookworm to the exclusion of
sounder means for acquiring knowledge, he devoured and digested every
scrap of literature which came in his way. Like all Scots children of
his class he learnt his Bible thoroughly from end to end--a knowledge
which served him well in later years. Shakespeare followed the Bible
in his own review of his favourite reading as a boy; but a gazetteer
or an almanac was quite as acceptable. His taste was for solid
fact--fact which he could learn and put to the test; thus the great
open book of Nature was the attraction he most readily yielded to. But
nothing in book form ever came amiss to him; if between the covers
there was useful information to be had, Simpson extracted it and
stored it away in his capacious brain.
The unusually large size of his head, a source of admiration in
manhood, was in childhood an object of wonder to observers. In manhood
he wore his hair in long locks, and this was apparently his habit in
boyhood. Once a strange barber cut his hair so close that his brother
took upon himself to go and rebuke the man. "The callant had suck a
muckle head," was the retort, "I was doin' my best to mak' it look
respectable." A close-cropped head gave altogether a too sportive
appearance to the "young philosopher" in the eyes of the watchful
elder brother.
There is no evidence that Simpson displayed in his schooldays any
special leaning towards the medical profession; it cannot be
reasonably urged that his grandfather's rough skill in the treatment
of animals fostered any medical tendency in him, for James was but
five years old when the old man died. Even had he been of an age to
understand them, the methods employed would have scarcely recommended
themselves to a youth of Simpson's nature, sufficiently to raise a
spirit of emulation within him. It is also not recorded that the
village doctor took any special interest in the boy or brought any
influence to bear upon him; although his note-book thus gives the
earliest record of the future prince of obstetricians:--
275.--June 7. Simpson, David, baker, Bathgate. Wife, Mary Jarvie.
AE. 40. 8th child, son. _Natus_ 8 o'clock. _Uti veniebam natus._
Paid 10s. 6d.
James displayed his superiority so decidedly in the village school
that when he reached the age of fourteen it was decided to send him to
Edinburgh University without further waste of time. It was no unusual
age for boys to commence their University career in Scotland. There
was no secondary education in the Scots provinces, but instruction
intermediate between that of the parish school and what is ordinarily
known as University education was given within the walls of the
University itself. Boys of humble rank who aspired to a profession
were sent up, as indeed many still are, at the age of fourteen or
fifteen, to attend these junior Arts classes in which this instruction
was, and still is, imparted. The University was crowded with
schoolboys of all ranks of life gathered together from town and
country, and consisted of nothing more than a collection of
class-rooms devoted to the giving of instruction in lecture form. This
stepping-stone of junior classes threw open the higher education to
hundreds of youths whose equals in England had no such advantage at
that time. Scots University education besides being thorough was
decidedly cheap, so that the church, law, and medicine received many
recruits from the class out of which Simpson was drawn.
His environment up to the age of fourteen was well calculated to train
him for the great work that lay before him. The legends of the
district, and the sight of the objects of archaeological interest which
he came across in his rambles out of school hours, were powerful
stimuli to his sensations; whilst the accurate observation of natural
phenomena in field and hedge which the kindly interested weavers
helped him to, was also a valuable educative influence. It is probable
that his senses received much of the training which was to lead to his
ultimately being the greatest physician of his day by these means,
rather than from the instruction imparted to him in the village
school, or derived by him independently from the books that came in
his way. It was undoubtedly a fortunate circumstance that he was born
and bred in an out-of-the-way country district, where he drew his
lessons from Nature and the phenomena which lay round him, rather than
in a great city where he would have been educated on the stereotyped
orthodox system. When we look further back, asking why he saw sermons
in stones and books in the running brooks, to which the bulk of his
schoolfellows were entirely blind, we are bound to confess that we
find no satisfactory answer in his family history, to which it is
customary to look for an explanation of such tendencies. Heredity
played no great part in making Simpson great; from the paternal side
there was imparted to him a vigorous physique; from his mother he
received the bright, happy, sympathetic, and alert disposition, which
descended through her from his French ancestors. He was provided with
a brain of marvellous quality and phenomenal size. But it was the
environment which acted upon this brain and brought out the capacities
born in him without any apparent hereditary bias, and which might have
remained entirely latent under less favourable circumstances. No small
part of the development was due to the people among whom he lived; a
race of men accustomed to rely upon their senses which were always
with them, rather than upon books which they seldom saw, even if they
were able to read them; and to observe not only all that lay around
them, but also the characteristics of their fellowmen with whom they
were brought into contact--the close contact of different classes
which obtains in village and rural life. Simpson was taught to study
Nature whether in field or fellow-creature first, and the knowledge
and opinions of men as expressed in books afterwards.