Sir James Young Simpson(1811–1870)

James Young Simpson was born at 8 Main Street, Bathgate, in West Lothian on the seventh of June 1811, youngest of the eight children of David Simpson, the Bathgate village baker, and Mary Jarvey. He was schooled at the Bathgate parish school, entered the University of Edinburgh at fourteen in 1825 on the strength of the family's collective sacrifice to pay the matriculation fees, took the Arts degree in 1827 in his sixteenth year, and proceeded to the Edinburgh Medical School. He qualified as a Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1830 at nineteen, took the MD in February 1832 at twenty in his third year, and was retained as Senior Resident at the Edinburgh Royal Maternity Hospital from 1835.

He was elected Professor of Midwifery at the University of Edinburgh on the fourth of February 1840 in his twenty-eighth year, the second youngest professorial appointment in the history of the medical school. He took the chair in succession to James Hamilton and held it for the next thirty years to his death, across which period he reformed the Edinburgh midwifery clinical-teaching system, founded the Edinburgh Obstetric Society in 1840, published the standard mid-nineteenth-century midwifery textbook (Obstetric Memoirs and Contributions, 1855), and built the Edinburgh school as the leading single English-language centre of obstetric practice of the Victorian period.

On the nineteenth of January 1847, on William Morton's October 1846 demonstration of ether anaesthesia at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Simpson became the first British obstetrician to use ether for the relief of labour pain at a delivery in his Queen Street consulting rooms. He continued the use of ether for the next nine months but was dissatisfied with it (the chemical irritability of the vapour to the patient's respiratory tract, the slow induction, and the prolonged sedation that followed). Through the autumn of 1847 he ran a systematic search through the chemistry of the volatile-vapour anaesthetic candidates and trialled them by personal inhalation in his Queen Street dining room with two assisting physicians, James Matthews Duncan and George Keith.

On the evening of the fourth of November 1847, in the dining room of 52 Queen Street, Edinburgh, after dinner with Duncan and Keith, Simpson opened a small bottle of chloroform that he had received that afternoon from the Edinburgh pharmacist Duncan, Flockhart and Company, and the three of them inhaled the vapour over their cocktail glasses. All three were instantly anaesthetised and fell forward across the dining room. Simpson was the first to revive (approximately three minutes later, on his subsequent reconstruction), revived the others, and the three of them re-inhaled the vapour several times across the rest of the evening to confirm the effect. He used chloroform clinically the next morning, on the fifth of November 1847, for the first deliberately-anaesthetised childbirth in medical history; he published the discovery in the paper Account of a New Anaesthetic Agent in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal in December 1847.

Chloroform anaesthesia was adopted across the next two years by every leading Anglo-American medical school and was used by John Snow for Queen Victoria's eighth and ninth childbirth (the births of Prince Leopold in April 1853 and Princess Beatrice in April 1857), the use that put the royal seal on the practice and ended the residual evangelical opposition to childbirth-pain-relief. Simpson was created the first Baronet of Strathavon and Simpson in 1866, was the first man to be knighted in Scotland for services to medicine, was elected President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1850, and died at Queen Street, Edinburgh, on the sixth of May 1870 in his fifty-ninth year. The Simpson name in modern medicine carries the weight of the Queen Street dining-room of the evening of the fourth of November 1847.