Sir James Simpson's introduction of chloroform / By his daughter.

  • Eve Blantyre Simpson
Date:
[1894]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sir James Simpson's introduction of chloroform / By his daughter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

    12/14 (page 420)
    greater than that lost by chloroform. At our different drug-manufactories in Edinburgh we have upward of two million doses of chloro- form manufactured annually, yet how rarely does a fatal result follow its use ! Is there any other common or potent drug which could be given in full doses in two million of instances per annum with greater impunity? To guard against a fatal case, he always ad- vised and administered the purest and best chlo- roform, prescribing quiet for the patient, and insisting that the dose should be given without timidity and in sufficient quantity to render the patient quickly insensible. Amid the crowd of work which hemmed him in, with character- istic energy and perseverance he collected statistics of fatal surgery and midwifery cases before and after the use of chloroform ; he was sure that the wearing fear which beset a pa- tient previous to undergoing pain, in addition to the enduring of it, undermined the nerves and constitution and increased the death-rate. Sir James Clarke, her Majesty's physician, wrote to him in 1853, thanking him for a book. You certainly are the most industrious man in the profession. It is really surprising that with your extensive and harassing practice you can find time to bring forth a volume ev- ery year. He goes on to say that the Queen had used chloroform in her late confinement, and adds truly, I know this information will please you, and I have little doubt it will lead to a more general use of chloroform in mid- wifery practice in this quarter than has hitherto prevailed. It was very near the end of Professor Simp- son's life, at the age of fifty-nine, when the early spring of the year of 1870 found him confined to his room, that an attempt from America was made to deprive him of his hard-won honors in regard to chloroform. To his sickbed, piled with books, and still the center of his profes- sional activity, came the criticism of Dr. Bige- low, directed against my father's omission to mention the American discovery in a general reference to the subject, in the course of his response to the speech of Lord Provost Cham- bers on presenting to him the freedom of the city in which he had lived and worked. Concerning this controversy Professor Simp- son wrote: I know from the utmost depths of my own con- science that I never said or wrote a single word to detract from the mightiness of the discovery of anesthesia by sulphuric ether. But surely the dis- covery of another anesthetic by mc a year after- ward, more powerful, practical, and useful than sidphuric ether, was in itself a fact of no small mo- ment, and tended, I well know, immensely to spread the use of anesthesia on this side of the Adantic. My father answered Dr. Bigelow in two clear explicit letters (bound up among his posthumous papers), in which he said: The history of anesthesia has always taken me afuUhourin my University lectures; and in these lectures I have year after year paid heartily every due compliment to the most important part borne in the consummation of the practical applications of anesthetics by America, particularly by the cities of Hartford and Boston, and specially by the energy and genius of Dr. Morton. And again: Inoculation was an idea brought from Asia and Turkey and acted on in England in the be- ginning of the last century. Ere, however, the century was closed, a new variety of matter was proposed to be inoculated by Dr. Jenner, and proved infinitely a greater success. That vacci- nation was thus a modification of smallpox inoc- ulation has never been allowed to detract one iota, I believe, from the merit of the great patho- logical and practical revolution produced by Dr. Jenner. The two discoveries have never clashed and been entangled together; for they were in our country upward of half a century or more separate from each other in the date of their introduction and discovery. Neither, I think, would the relative merits of the two anesthetics, the American sulphuric ether and the English chloroform, have co-mi.\ed in the manner in which they have been confused by you and others, had their discoveries been separated by upward of half a century also. In Boston has been erected a monument inscribed : To commemorate the discovery that the inhaling of ether causes insensibility to pain ; first proved to the world at the Mas- sachusetts General Hospital at Boston, Oc- tober, A. D. 1846. At Westminster, on my father's bust, are the words : To whose genius and benevolence the world owes the blessings derived from the useof chloroform for the relief of suffering. Below the date of his death (May 6, 1870) might fitly be engraved his motto, Victo Dolore, for before his letter on anes- thesia had reached America he had been ac- corded rest by him who giveth his beloved sleep, and so had obtained an everlasting victory over pain. Eve Blantyre SimJ)Soii. \