prepared to realise these great expectations, and the French had other views. Simpson determined to resign a command which he had accepted with some hesitation, and on 10 Nov. he handed it over to Codrington. He passed the rest of his life in retirement, and died at Horringer, near Bury St. Edmunds, on 18 April 1868. He had been made colonel of his old regiment, the 29th, instead of the 87th, on 27 July 1863. Besides the medal and clasp for Sebastopol, he received the grand cross of the legion of honour, and of the military order of Savoy, the first class of the Medjidie, and the Turkish medal.
In 1839 Simpson married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Robert Dundas, bart., of Beechwood, Midlothian. She died in 1840.
[Times, 21 April 1868; Hamilton's Hist. of the Grenadier Guards; Everard's Hist. of the 29th Regiment; Kinglake's Invasion of the Crimea; Sayer's Despatches and Papers relative to the Campaign in Turkey, &c.; Wood's Crimea in 1854 and 1894; Adye's Recollections of a Military Life.]
SIMPSON, Sir JAMES YOUNG (1811–1870), physician, born on 7 June 1811 at Bathgate, Linlithgowshire, was youngest of seven sons of the village baker, David (d. 1830), fourth son of Alexander Simpson. Both father and mother, Mary Jervie, came of shrewd yeoman-farmer stock. The latter was of Huguenot descent.
At four James went to the local school. Proud of his early aptitude at lessons, his father and brothers (his mother died when he was nine) agreed to stint themselves to give him a college career. He entered the arts classes of Edinburgh University in 1825 at fourteen, ‘very, very young, very solitary,’ he said forty years later, when receiving the freedom of the city of Edinburgh. He began his medical studies in 1827, and graduated M.D. in 1832. His abilities were at once recognised, and he was made senior president of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh in 1835. In 1839 he was appointed to the midwifery chair there, although he was only twenty-eight years old. Thenceforth his practice grew rapidly.
In 1846, when news of the first trials of sulphuric ether in America reached Scotland, Simpson wrote: ‘It is a glorious thought, I can think of naught else.’ He at once made the first trial of it in obstetric practice, and, convinced of its utility, enthusiastically advocated its use. But he soon came to the conclusion that a more efficient and portable anæsthetic might be found. Chloroform had been hitherto used solely for internal administration. On 4 Nov. 1847 Simpson and his assistants, Doctors George Keith and Duncan, made for the first time the experiment of inhaling it. They proved its efficacy as an anæsthetic by simultaneously falling insensible below the table. The public trial of it was successfully held a fortnight later at Edinburgh Infirmary. Its use was strongly denounced as dangerous to health, morals, and religion, and Simpson had to battle stubbornly against prejudice, but he ultimately won the victory, and chloroform as an anæsthetic came into universal use.
In 1847 he was appointed one of her majesty's physicians for Scotland; and he became a foreign associate of the Academy of Medicine, Paris, the members firmly insisting on his election against the rules of the commission which had omitted his name. In 1856 he was awarded by the French Academy of Sciences the Monthyon prize of two thousand francs for ‘most important benefits done to humanity.’ He received the order of St. Olaf from the king of Sweden, and became member of nearly every medical society in Europe and America. In 1866 he was made D.C.L. of Oxford, and in the same year (3 Feb.) received a baronetcy, the first given to a doctor practising in Scotland.
But the development of anæsthesia was by no means Simpson's sole achievement. His genius was of a versatile order, and prompted him to attack questions as far asunder as acupressure and the use of the pyramids. His chief triumphs, apart from his contribution to anæsthesia, were in gynæcology and obstetrics. It may be said that he laid the greater part of the foundation of gynæcology. His discovery of the means of investigating disease, notably the uterine sound and the sponge tent, gave a power of diagnosis previously wanting, and enabled the practitioner to carry out treatment impossible before. To the science of obstetrics at the same time Simpson gave a new precision, while in the practical branches, notably in the use of the obstetric forceps and of the various methods of ovariotomy, his work was of the highest value. His papers on version in deformed pelves, on methods of version, on puerperal conditions, and many other subjects, are of permanent importance. His monograph on hermaphroditism is still the best exposition of a most difficult subject. His work on acupressure failed to attain the success he predicted for it, and has been superseded. Nevertheless, it brought out some interesting facts, valuable in themselves, as to the results of occlusion of blood-vessels.
Simpson was admirable in controversy. When in the right he was irresistible, and
