Simpson

On the late evening of the fourth of November 1847, in the dining-room of 52 Queen Street in central Edinburgh, James Young Simpson, thirty-six years old, the Bathgate-born Professor of Midwifery at the University of Edinburgh since 1839, and his colleagues Dr George Keith and Dr James Matthews Duncan, sat down after the family dinner with a box of experimental volatile-liquid samples that Simpson had been collecting from the chemists of Edinburgh over the previous fortnight, with the intention of testing them as anaesthetic candidates by the inhalation of small quantities. Ether had been used in surgery for about a year (since the Boston Massachusetts General Hospital demonstration of October 1846) but had the disadvantages of slow induction and pulmonary irritation. The third sample of the evening was a clear sweet-smelling liquid the chemists at Duncan and Flockhart on the South Bridge had provided to Simpson on the request three days earlier: trichloromethane, or chloroform. The three doctors inhaled small quantities. Within about a minute the three were, by Simpson's later account, most happily under the influence and showing in our faces and in our conversation the effects we had been seeking. Within ten minutes all three were unconscious on the dining-room floor. Simpson came round first (about half past eleven), woke the others, made notes of the experience, and wrote up the observations the following day. He presented the paper to the Edinburgh Medico-Chirurgical Society on the tenth of November 1847. Chloroform-assisted childbirth was administered for the first time on the eighth of November to a Mrs Carstairs of Edinburgh. Queen Victoria received chloroform from John Snow for the birth of her eighth child Prince Leopold in 1853, giving the royal imprimatur to the practice and effectively closing the church-of-Scotland resistance to obstetric anaesthesia.

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