Part 3 (2/2)
The personal power and attractiveness of the man were large factors in gaining the practice which he now enjoyed. But he did not depend for success on these alone, by any means. His professional reputation was fully won by great work in obstetrics and gynaecology, and by the introduction of methods and instruments which contributed to the saving of countless lives. It has been said that he gave a new life to the obstetric art, and presided at the birth of gynaecology. He had done this before the great deed was dreamt of which hands his name down to posterity, before his discovery of the anaesthetic power of chloroform. Simpson was a great physician, the leading pract.i.tioner of the art and exponent of the science with which his name will always be connected. But many great physicians have failed to fulfil as Simpson did, Robert Louis Stevenson's description of the physician:--
”Generosity he has such as is possible to those who practise an art, never to those who drive a trade; discretion tested by a hundred secrets; tact tried in a thousand embarra.s.sments; and what are more Heraclean cheerfulness and courage. So it is that he brings air and cheer into the sick room, and often enough, though not so often as he wishes, brings healing.”
Great as a man and great as a physician, Simpson was actually run after by the greatest in the land. In 1845 he was summoned professionally to London, and gave an interesting description of his kindly reception by the d.u.c.h.ess of Sutherland and her family in a letter written from Stafford House. His advent to London was a matter of notoriety, and he noted that he bought in the street a life of himself which mightily diverted him and made him laugh until he was sore. A year or more later he was invited for rest and change to Erskine House by Lord Blantyre, where he says, ”the d.u.c.h.ess of Sutherland, the Marquis and Marchioness of Lorne, and two Ladies Gower have made up with myself all the strangers.” ”Tell Janet,” he wrote to his brother, ”I think now artificial flowers very ungenteel. The ladies here wear nothing but real flowers in their hair, and every day they come down with something new and for us males to guess at. Often the d.u.c.h.ess wears a simple chaplet of ivy leaves, sometimes a bracken leaf is all she sports in her head ornaments, and beautiful it looks. Rowans and 'haws' are often worn beaded into crowns or flowers or chaplets. Heather is also a favourite. On Thursday Lady Lorne came down with a most beautiful chaplet tying round and keeping down her braided hair. It was a long bunch of bramble leaves and half-ripe bramble berries--actual true brambles. They have been all exceedingly kind to me, and I really feel quite at home among them though the only unt.i.tled personage at table.”
The daily scene at 52, Queen Street was now unique. Those who had the fortune to lunch or breakfast in that hospitable house never forgot it. Statesmen, n.o.blemen, artists, scientists, clergymen, and politicians from various countries sat down together and entertained each other or attempted to do so in their different languages. The host guided the conversation while he still glanced over the newspaper or some newly published book, and never failed by skilful leading to entice out of every one the best knowledge that they possessed. With his quick insight he rarely failed in his estimate of character, but rapidly perceived even in a stranger where the conventional ceased and the real man began.
No stranger to Edinburgh omitted to bring or obtain an introduction to the genial professor; all were welcome, and an open table was kept.
The scene has been described from intimate knowledge in the columns of the _Scots Observer_ as follows:--”Luncheon is set on the table, and some ten, twenty, or even fifty people wait the appearance of their host, who is on his rounds maybe, or in another room ministers to an urgent case. A stranger who has not learnt that the great Simpson was only in the broadest sense a punctual man--of minutes, hours, he knew nothing, but none more reliably punctual, few so unsparingly regular in working while 'tis called to-day--might be prompted by hungry discontent to suggest that none but the wealthiest can keep the doctor from his guests. The mere suggestion would be infamous, for rich and ragged alike pay fees or not exactly as it pleases them. Whatever the cause, the host still lingers, and the impatient stranger has time to wonder how it is that so odd an a.s.sortment of human beings should be met together in one room. Lords and Commons rub shoulders at his table; the salt of the earth sit down side by side with the savourless; tweed jostles broadcloth; the town-bred Briton looks askance at his country-bred compatriot, and both unconsciously shudder at the Briton with no breeding at all. In one room are a.s.sembled together the American of bluest blood; the Yankee bagman; the slave-owning Southerner, and even the man of colour hateful to both alike. The atmosphere is chill like the grave, each guest, eyeing his neighbour suspiciously, shrinks into his own social sh.e.l.l; on each face the meanness and sn.o.bbery of humankind is, if not aggressively expressed, at least clearly legible; when all at once Simpson bustles in. In a few minutes, under the genial influence of his presence, all tongues are set a-wagging, and well may you ask whether the men who leave his house after luncheon are those who half-an-hour ago regarded each other with cold disdain. For now they are cordial, kindly, sympathetic; each has been induced to show whatever was attractive in his nature, or to give the fruits of his experience. If in one short hour Simpson could thus transform a crowd of frigid, haughty strangers into an a.s.semblage of decent, amiable human beings, what could he not achieve in a day, a year, or a life?”
His reception of members of his own profession was specially cordial, and if those from any one country were more welcome than others, it was the many who crossed the Atlantic to see and hear him. America had the greatest share in the birth of anaesthetics, and Simpson's intimacy with so many of the profession in the United States made it easy for them to welcome his a.s.sistance in that great event. Gynaecology, too, was eagerly taken up in America, and many were Simpson's admirers from that country who returned home fired by his influence to work out for themselves valuable additions to that science.
Simpson paid close attention to current events in other branches of science, in politics, and in religion. Sir Robert Christison and he were at one time a.s.sociated in an enterprise which narrowly escaped being the source of a fortune to him. Rangoon petroleum which was obtained from pits dug on the banks of the Irawaddy had been chemically investigated by Christison, and he had isolated from it a substance which he named petroline; unfortunately, unknown to him, a German chemist had independently made the same discovery a few months earlier, and christened the substance paraffin. When, a few years later, it occurred to Simpson that the crude Rangoon petroleum might serve as a lubricant for machinery and prove cheaper than those in general use, he applied to Christison. He met with willing a.s.sistance, but a refusal on principle to have anything to do with a patent, which Christison laughingly suggested, might be called ”Simpson's incomparable antifriction lubricant!”
”When I called for Simpson,” says Christison, in his Recollections, ”his two reception rooms were as usual full of patients, more were seated in the lobby, female faces stared from all the windows in vacant expectancy, and a lady was ringing the door bell. But the doctor brushed through the crowd to join me, and left them all kicking their heels for the next two hours.”
Their experiments proved that petroleum was vastly superior to sperm oil, the best known and most commonly used lubricant. Simpson proceeded to take out a patent, having no such scruples as Christison; but to his chagrin found that he had been forestalled by others, and had to abandon the subject.
About the period now referred to Scotland was stirred from end to end by the ecclesiastical movement which culminated in the crisis known as the Disruption, when, for reasons connected with the jurisdiction of the National Church, a majority of its members severed their connection therewith in a public and dramatic fas.h.i.+on, and ”came out”
to found the now strong and vigorous Free Kirk. Simpson at first steered clear of all the squabbles and discussions which the movement gave rise to, but when affairs approached a crisis he threw his lot in with the leaders of the new movement, and became a staunch Free Churchman.
Busy as he was, Simpson fully enjoyed his home and all the inner domestic life. He was a cheery and hearty host to his intimate friends, and took a pleasure in impromptu entertainments got up by himself in his own house, when he found time at his disposal for such amus.e.m.e.nt. His first child--a daughter--of whom he was mightily proud, was born in 1840; his first son, David, in 1842; and the second, Walter, in 1843. In 1844 the young couple, in the midst of their rising prosperity, suffered the loss of their daughter, who died after a brief illness. Simpson felt the loss keenly, and wrote pathetically on the subject to his relations; long afterwards he loved to talk of her and her winning ways.
By 1846 the vast majority of his work lay in obstetrics and gynaecology, although he himself would no doubt have indignantly repelled the suggestion that he was a specialist; his mind recognised the interdependence of all the great branches of the healing art, and the necessity for any who wished to excel or be useful pract.i.tioners to be _au courant_ with each and every branch. He had early shown that as a pathologist alone he was worthy of a niche in the temple of fame; and in later days he was urged to apply for the vacant chair of Physic in his own University; while Professor A. R. Simpson tells us that foreigners working in the sphere of surgery sometimes spoke of him as a surgeon.
Early in 1847 his good friend, the d.u.c.h.ess of Sutherland, wrote to inform him that the Queen had much pleasure in conferring upon him the vacant post of Physician to Her Majesty. In the Queen's own words, ”His high character and abilities made him very fit for the post.” He held this post until his death, under the t.i.tle of Physician Accoucheur to the Queen for Scotland.
Thus in his thirty-sixth year, to the pride of his family and of the whole village community in which he had been born and received his early training, to the admiration of patients and friends, as well as to his own conscious satisfaction, the Bathgate baker's son had risen by his own efforts to the highest attainable position in his native land. But the work which was to make him one of the most conspicuous figures in the history of medicine, and raise him to a place of honour in the grateful estimation of humanity, was scarcely begun.
CHAPTER VI
THE DISCOVERY OF ANaeSTHETICS. 1844-1847
His early sympathy for suffering--Surgical methods before the discovery of anaesthetics--His mental struggle caused by the sickening sights of the operating theatre--His researches into the history of anaesthesia--Indian hemp--Mandrake--Alcohol--Hypnotism and other methods--Inhalation of drugs--Sir Humphry Davy--Anaesthetics discovered in America--Horace Wells and laughing-gas--Morton and ether--Ether in Great Britain--He uses it in midwifery practice--Search for a better-anaesthetic--Discovery of anaesthetic power of chloroform.
From his earliest student days the desire had ever been present in Simpson's mind to see some means devised for preventing the sufferings endured by patients on the operating table, without, as he put it, ”interfering with the free and healthy play of the natural functions.”
It is difficult for us at the close of the nineteenth century to understand, without an effort of the imagination, the strong incentives which he had for such a wish. Even to-day, when operations are conducted without the infliction of pain, young students are not unfrequently overcome by the sight and the thought of what is in front of them. At the commencement of a winter session the theatre is crowded with those students who are entering upon surgical study, and with others, not so far advanced, who have come to get a preliminary peep at the practice of this fascinatingly interesting art. Many of these at first succ.u.mb and faint even before the surgeon has begun his work, and sometimes are only persuaded to pursue their studies by the encouragement of kindly teachers.
Simpson also went through this trying experience, but it must have been a greater struggle to him to persist. The surroundings of the surgeon at the commencement of the century were vastly more repugnant to a youth of sensitive nature than to-day. The operating theatre then has been compared to a butcher's shambles; cleanliness was not considered necessary, and little attention was paid to the feelings of the patient. He was held down by three or four pairs of powerful arms as the surgeon boldly and rapidly did his work, despite the screams, stopping, perhaps, only to roughly abuse the patient for some agonised movement which had interfered with the course of action. The poor wretch saw the instruments handed one by one by the a.s.sistant, and heard the surgeon's calm directions and his remarks on the case. The barbarous practice of arresting bleeding by the application of red-hot irons to the surface of the wound had indeed ceased three centuries before, when that humane reformer, Pare, displaced it with the method of tying the open blood-vessel, but the patient's blood gushed forth before him until arrested, into the sawdust spread to receive it, and the sight and the hot odour of it oftentimes mercifully caused him to faint. The spirit of Pare who, when relating a successful operation, would humbly add at the end, ”I dressed him; G.o.d healed him,” had not descended to those who practised in Simpson's day the art for which Pare did so much. It had grown to be necessary for a surgeon to be rough and callous; it was expected of him by the public; he was a man to be pointed at in the street, and shuddered at when he pa.s.sed, by all who devoutly prayed they might escape his clutches. Much of this conduct was mere mannerism; it had become the custom, and had to be maintained in order to preserve the dignity and stamp the ident.i.ty of the surgeon. Much of it arose from the haste with which the surgeon had to work; the quicker the operation the better chance had the patient; it was no uncommon thing to see a bystander timing the surgeon's work, as the professional time-keeper carefully times a race; and the rapidity of each surgeon's performances was a subject of comparison and admiration amongst the students of his day. Much of it also arose from the effect of the hideous scenes in the operating room upon the surgeon himself; his nerve had to become of iron if he desired to succeed, and with the nerve the face and the manner, but not necessarily always the heart hardened also. Tennyson possibly recollected these days, when he wrote of the surgeon who
”Sent a chill to my heart when I saw him come in at the door, Fresh from the surgery schools of France, and of other lands; Harsh red hair, big voice, big chest, big merciless hands.”
When Simpson first saw Liston raise his knife to operate on a poor Highland woman, he actually felt so repelled that he contemplated abandoning his studies, and made a serious attempt to enter upon legal work instead. But the mental struggle with which medical men of all countries, and in all times, can sympathise out of their own knowledge, ended in a victory for medicine, and a triumphant return to his studies with the question permanently engraved on the tablets of his mind, ”Can nothing be done to prevent this suffering?”
It is necessary and it is certainly beneficial that we should thus remind ourselves of the horrors which surrounded the surgeon so recently as sixty years ago. ”Before the days of anaesthetics,” wrote an old patient to Simpson, in a letter which he treasured with pride--the writer was himself a medical man--”a patient preparing for an operation was like a condemned criminal preparing for execution. He counted the days till the appointed day came. He counted the hours of that day till the appointed hour came. He listened for the echo in the street of the surgeon's carriage. He watched for his pull at the door bell; for his foot on the stair; for his step in the room; for the production of his dreaded instruments; for his few grave words, and his last preparations before beginning. And then he surrendered his liberty and, revolting at the necessity, submitted to be held or bound, and helplessly gave himself up to the cruel knife.”.
It was, indeed, a monstrous ogre this giant Pain, holding the poor weak human creature in its merciless clutches, which Simpson even in his youthful days bethought himself to attack. It is well that we who are the heirs, should know how Simpson and those others whose names are ever a.s.sociated with his, slew the monster, won the victory, and championed the human race forward into a land where further victories undreamt of by themselves are now being daily won.
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