Simpson's chloroform anesthesia

James Young Simpson, son of village bakers in Bathgate, became Professor of Midwifery at the University of Edinburgh in 1840. He was quick to see the importance of inhaled ether when its use in surgery was reported, and on 19 January 1847 he gave ether during a difficult labor. He was not satisfied with the result.

In the summer of 1847 he and his assistants, George Keith and James Matthews Duncan, began inhaling one chemical after another in his dining room to see which might work. On the evening of 4 November they tried chloroform, a liquid they had set aside as unpromising. They felt elated and then lost consciousness. Simpson repeated the test on his niece with the same effect. The University of Edinburgh's account notes that a larger dose would probably have killed them, and a smaller one would not have put them under.

He gave chloroform in a birth on 8 November, having already used it for minor operations, and announced it that month in a pamphlet, Account of a New Anaesthetic Agent, which was also printed in London; the Scotsman carried his account on its front page. By the end of the year manufacturers could not keep up with demand, and within weeks chloroform had almost replaced ether as the standard anesthetic.

Childbirth was harder to win over. Many people accepted chloroform for long or operative deliveries but objected to it in normal labor, which they saw as naturally painful, and Simpson used it regardless. Opposition faded after 7 April 1853, when Queen Victoria gave birth to her eighth child under chloroform. Overdoses and other reactions later brought regulation and a search for safer agents.

In 1869 Simpson persuaded the Edinburgh medical faculty to let Sophia Jex-Blake attend the classes of any professor willing to teach her. He died on 6 May 1870.