SIMPSON, Sir James Young, Bart. (1811-1870), physician, was born in the town of Bathgate, Linlithgow, Scotland, on the 7th of June 1811. His father was a baker in that town, who largely owed a moderate success in business to a shrewd and managing wife. James was the youngest of a family of eight, and for the furtherance of his worldly prospects the others struggled and sacrificed. At the age of fourteen he entered the university of Edinburgh as a student in the arts classes. Two years later he began his medical studies. At the age of nineteen he obtained the licence of the College of Surgeons, and two years afterwards took the degree of doctor of medicine. Dr Thomson, who then occupied the chair of pathology in the university, impressed with the graduation thesis, “On Death from Inflammation,” presented by Simpson, offered him his assistantship. The offer was accepted, and during the session 1837-38 he acted as interim lecturer on pathology during the illness of the professor. The following winter he delivered his first course of lectures on obstetric medicine in the extra-academical school. On February 4, 1840, he was elected to the professorship of medicine and midwifery in the university. Towards the end of 1846 he was present at an operation performed by Liston on a patient rendered unconscious by the inhalation of sulphuric ether. The success of the proceeding was so marked that Simpson immediately began to use it in midwifery practice. He continued, however, to search for other substances having similar effects, and in March 1847 he read a paper on chloroform to the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh, in which he fully detailed the history of the use of anaesthetics from the earliest times, but especially dwelt upon the advantages of chloroform over ...ether. He advocated its use, not only for the prevention of pain in surgical operations, but also for the relief of pain in obstetrical practice. His strong and uncompromising advocacy of its use in the latter class of cases gave rise to one of the angriest and most widespread controversies of the time, and, although his views may not have been generally indorsed by later professional practice, anaesthetics in surgical operations have from that time held an indisputed place, and Simpson’s anaesthetic still continues the favourite in the practice of the Edinburgh school. In 1847 he was appointed a physician to the queen in Scotland. In 1859 he advocated the use of acupressure in place of ligatures for arresting bleeding; his views on this subject have, however, given place to improvements in the ligature and to a better knowledge of the conditions influencing its efficiency. His contributions to the literature of his profession and to archaeology, in which latter he took an active interest, were very numerous, and embrace Obstetric Memoirs and Contributions (2 vols.), Homoeopathy, Acupressure, Selected Obstetrical Works, Anaesthesia and Hospitalism, Clinical Lectures on the Diseases of Women, and three volumes of essays on archaeological subjects. Simpson, who had been created a baronet in 1866, died on May 6th 1870, and was accorded a public funeral; his statue in bronze now stands in West Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh.
Simpson was a man of strong individuality and somewhat hasty temper, an uncompromising and aggressive opponent when he believed himself in the right, yet so tender and sympathetic that he endeared himself to an immense circle of friends and patients. Endowed with great mental power, activity, and receptivity, he performed a very large amount of literary work, much of which was of great value at the time and still continues to be of interest. He will, however, be chiefly remembered in the annals of medicine as a great personality, who brilliantly fought and won the battle for anaesthetics, and introduced chloroform.
SIMPSON, Thomas (1710-1761), mathematician, was born at Market Bosworth in Leicestershire on the 20th of August 1710. His father was a stuff weaver, and, intending to bring his son up to his own business, took little care of the boy’s education. Young Simpson, however, was eager for knowledge, and so ardent was he in pursuit of it that he neglected his weaving, and in consequence of a quarrel was forced to leave his father’s house. He settled for a short time at Nuneaton, where he met a pedlar who practised fortune-telling. By the encouragement and assistance of this man Simpson was induced to make a profession of casting nativities himself, and he soon became the oracle of the neighbourhood. But he was not long in discovering the imposture of astrology, and his conscience, as well as an accident which happened to him in the practice of his art, compelled him to abandon this profession. After a residence of two or three years at Derby, where he worked as a weaver during the day and taught pupils in the evenings, he went up to London and pursued the same course, but with more success. The number of his pupils increased; his abilities became more widely known; and he was enabled to publish by subscription his Treatise of Fluxions in 1737. His treatise, as was afterwards acknowledged, abounded with errors of the press, and contained several obscurities and defects incidental to the author’s want of experience and the disadvantages under which he laboured. His next publications were A Treatise on the Nature and Laws of Chance, 1740; Essays on Several Curious and Useful Subjects in Speculative and Mixed Mathematicks, 1740; The Doctrine of Annuities and Reversions deduced from General and Evident Principles, 1742; and Mathematical Dissertations on a Variety of Physical and Analytical Subjects, 1743. Soon after the publication of his Essays he was chosen a member of the Royal Academy at Stockholm; in 1743 he was appointed professor of mathematics in the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich; and in 1745 he was admitted a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 1745 he published A Treatise of Algebra, with an appendix containing the construction of geometrical problems, and in 1747 the Elements of Plane Geometry. The latter book, unlike many others with the same title, is not an edition of Euclid’s Elements, but an independent treatise. Though it can hardly be said that as an introduction to geometry it is preferable to Euclid, yet the solutions of problems contained in it (and in the appendix to the Algebra as well) are in general exceedingly ingenious. In his Trigonometry, Plane and Spherical, with the Construction and Application of Logarithms, which appeared in 1748, there is a tolerably uniform use of contractions for the words sine, tangent, &c., prefixed to the symbol of the angle. The Doctrine and Application of Fluxions, which he issued in 1750, was more full and comprehensive than his earlier work on the same subject, and altogether was so different that he wished it to be considered as a new book and not as a second edition of the former. In 1752 appeared Select Exercises for Young Proficients in the Mathematicks, and in 1757 his Miscellaneous Tracts on Some Curious and Very Interesting Subjects in Mechanics, Physical Astronomy, and Speculative Mathematics, the last and perhaps the greatest of all his works. From the year 1735 he had sometimes under his own name, sometimes under fictitious names, been a frequent contributor to the Ladies' Diary, an annual publication partly devoted to the solution of mathematical problems, and from 1754 till 1760 inclusive he was the editor of it. From first to last Simpson seems to have had his own share of the cares and anxieties of this world, and it is astonishing how under such circumstances he contrived to accomplish what he did. His unremitting application and the want of proper regimen gradually undermined his health, and he died on the 14th of May 1761 at his native village. His name will probably be considered the most illustrious in the long roll of the non-academical mathematicians of Britain.
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