(1811 - 1870)
Scottish Obstetrician
Dr James Simpson was born the seventh son and eighth child of an impecunious baker. After a rapid ascent up the medical academic ladder, he was appointed professor of medicine and midwifery at Edinburgh in 1839 at the remarkably young age of twenty eight.
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Simpson combined intellectual brilliance with compassion. Distraught after witnessing the practice of surgery without anaesthesia, Simpson wrote:
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"That great principle of emotion which both impels us to
feel sympathy at the sight of suffering in any fellow creature, and at the same time imparts to us delight and gratification
in the exercise of any power by which we can mitigate
and alleviate that suffering."
The effects of liquid chloroform on Simpson
and his friends.
Photo: Wellcome Images • Licensed for reuse under CC BY 4.0
At first this seemed a forlorn hope. Simpson tried mesmerism; it didn't work. Then came news of a revolutionary breakthrough across the Atlantic. Anaesthesia was initially used in dentistry and surgery.
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Simpson pioneered chloroform anaesthesia in obstetrics. Earlier in January 1847 he had used diethyl ether in Edinburgh to relieve labour pains. In his essay Answer to the Religious Arguments advanced Against the Employment of Anaesthetic Agents in Midwifery and Surgery (1847), Simpson sought to demolish all conceivable religious objections to painless surgery and childbirth.
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In the Mid-19th century Britain was still a deeply religious society. Biblical literalism was common in patients and sometimes their doctors as well. A woman in labour who sought pain relief no longer risked being burned alive as a witch on royal command; but any innovation that challenged the natural and God-given order of the world was bound to be controversial. Christian fundamentalism has declined, but the under-treatment of all forms of pain was still rife.
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Simpson tended to exaggerate the strength of religious hostility to anaesthesia and underplay more practical medical worries. Yet it is also a tribute to Simpson's success that within fifteen years or so the ideological battle had essentially been won - though deep controversies remained over the least dangerous and most effective anaesthetic agent to use. Simpson championed chloroform. For a time it became fashionable. Ether is smelly, inconvenient and flammable, but it proved safer.
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Obstetric anaesthesia remained controversial for far longer - indeed dissent persists to this day. But most doctors were now simply worried about the potential risks to mother and baby. Physicians like Thomas Brown, who claimed that unnatural painlessness in delivery was an invention of the Devil, now formed a dwindling minority.
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"All pain is per se and especially in excess, destructive and ultimately fatal in its nature and effects."
James Young Simpson
Source: Wikipedia
Images: Believed to be in the Public Domain or used with permission
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