St Giles, Edinburgh - Interior » Si James Young Simpson
SIMPSON, Sir James Young (1811-70) Physician The seventh son of a Bathgate banker, Simpson justified his family’s expectations when he entered Edinburgh University at the age of 14. Two years later he started to study medicine, gained his MD in 1832 and became Professor of Midwifery in 1835. Searching for an anaesthetic to ease the pain of childbirth, he experimented first with sulphuric ether and then with chloroform. He tested the latter on himself and his colleagues; all slid beneath the table unconscious. Chloroform was not his invention but his persistence and advocacy in the face of denunciations of its physical and moral implications eventually resulted in its general adoption. After Simpson’s appointment as one of Queen Victoria’s Physicians in Scotland (1847) criticism was silenced when her son, Prince Leopold, was delivered under anaesthetic in 1853. International honours followed and in 1866 Simpson was the first man to be made a baronet for services to medicine. He made other important improvements in obstetric and gynaecological practice and also wrote on literary and archaeological subjects. He is memorialised by a statue in Princes Street Gardens and an inscription on his house at 52 Queen Street, where he died. His family declined the offer of burial in Westminster Abbey in favour of Warriston cemetery in Canonmills, Edinburgh.
He was a Freemason having been Initiated in Lodge Hopetown, No.180 in 1830 when he was 19 years old following in the footsteps of his father. Unfortunately, the Lodge no longer exists and was declared dormant in 1904. Brother Simpson’s subsequent Masonic career has not, as far as we are aware, been researched.
