Sir James Young Simpson and chloroform (1811-1870) / by H. Laing Gordon.

  • Gordon, H. Laing (Henry Laing)
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sir James Young Simpson and chloroform (1811-1870) / by H. Laing Gordon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    body for the relief of colic still had their professional advocates, but happily a decreasing number ; whilst those pains “. . . In the hour, When the veil of the body we feel Rent round us—while torments reveal The motherhood’s advent in power ” —pains which Simpson was the first truly to relieve by his application of anaesthetics, were gravely said to be alleviated by the swallowing of a concoction of white onions and oil. Surgery was no doubt ahead of medicine ; but the early surgical records of this century have little more than a curious interest to modern practitioners. Operations entirely unknown to our professional forefathers less than a century ago are now performed in safety daily. Such mysterious diseases as “ icteric irritative fever ” and “ acute sinking ” after operations, dreaded then with the fear that is always inspired by unseen or ill-understood dangers, have vanished before the progress of modern science in which the introduction of anaesthesia was the first great step. The practice of the branch of medicine which Simpson made so peculiarly his own—that of ob- stetrics—originally in the hands of women only, had been fiercely contested for by the two sexes during two centuries, and such was the feeling against man- midwives in Scotland that the dispute had scarcely ceased at Simpson’s birth. The stronger sex, however,