SIMPSON, SIR James Young, Scottish ob stetrician and developer of anaesthesia: b. Bath gate, Linlithgow, 7 June 1811; d. Edinburgh, 6 May 1870. He entered Edinburgh University at 14 years of age and took his M.D. there in 1832. His brilliant graduation thesis won him the immediate appointment of assistant to Dr. John Thomson, professor of pathology at the University; and he also engaged in practice in Edinburgh, in which he was unusually success ful. In 1839, when he was but 29, he was ap pointed professor of midwifery at the uni versity. Of a keenly sympathetic temperament he was from the first deeply interested in the reports from America of the use of sulphuric ether as an anaesthetic and late in the year 1846 he witnessed an operation performed by Robert Lister in which the patient was rendered com pletely unconscious. Simpson soon afterward made the first trial of it in obstetric practice and upon its proving successful he continued its use and became its enthusiastic advocate. He believed, however, that an improved anes thetic could be found and in 1847 he established the efficacy of chloroform in this respect, making the first public trial of it in November 1847 at the Edinburgh Infirmary. His advocacy of the use of anesthetics in obstetric cases aroused from the first a storm of protest not only from the medical profession but on the part of the public and clergy as well. His triumph in its final adoption was materially hastened by the appointment conferred upon him by Queen Victoria in 1846 as her personal surgeon in Scotland and her subsequent treatment by him in childbirth. In 1856 he was awarded the Mon
thyon Prize of the French Academy of Sciences for his achievements in anesthetics; he was made a member of practically all the European and American medical societies; and in 1866 he received a baronetcy, the first awarded a physician in Scotland. He made further not able achievements in gynecology, in which he was far in advance of his time. Much of his phenomenal success is credited to his ability to foresee possibilities, an evidence of which occurs in his graduation thesis, wherein he voiced the hope that in the future physicians might be able to inspect the entire body by the
of electric and other lights,p an advantage later given by the X-Ray. His family declined burial for him in Westminster Abbey, but a bust of him was placed there. A statue was erected in Edinburgh, but his chief monument is the Maternity and Simpson Memorial Hospital at Edinburgh. In the med ical profession he ranks with Harvey, Jenner and Lister. Author of