The six Scots who pioneered medical science in the 19th century

I am well aware that my list so far has not been fully comprehensive and perhaps I should have written more about the many Scottish physicians who practised their science and rose to fame abroad, particularly in the US, for example. Military doctors such as Sir William Leishman, Colonel David Bruce – Brucellosis is named after him – and James Lind should also have been mentioned, and I have also missed out on whole swathes of developments in Scottish medicine that led the world at the time.

But, as I always hope, perhaps my scribblings over the past few weeks will inspire you to look further into the history, not least because readers of The National will surely want to know more about a subject that will convince people of Scotland’s true place in the world – wha’s like us, and so forth.

Regular readers will know that I have been quoting from Charles W Thomson’s Scotland’s Work and Worth: An Epitome of Scotland’s Story from Early Times to the Twentieth Century, with a Survey of the Contributions of Scotsmen in Peace and in War to the Growth of the British Empire and the Progress of the World, published in two volumes in 1909. Based on Thomson’s book, I will shortly began a series on Scotland’s greatest scientists and engineers from the Middle Ages to the 20th century.

Back to the Super Six, however. In strictly chronological order of birth I’ll start with Sir James Young Simpson and Lord Joseph Lister, whose towering achievements make them the most famous Scottish medical figures of the 19th century.

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As Thomson wrote: “The enormous developments in modern surgery owe their possibility and success to the two greatest medical discoveries of the modern world, anaesthesia and the antiseptic treatment of wounds, and both of these were evolved in Scottish hospitals, the first by Simpson, the second by Lister.”

I have written before about both men and summarise their lives and careers today. James Young Simpson was born in 1811 in Bathgate (then in Linlithgowshire and now in West Lothian), where his father was a baker. He was the seventh son and eighth child of his parents.

It was clear from an early age that he was highly intelligent and at 14 he was sent to Edinburgh University where he enrolled for an arts degree, switching to medicine two years later.

Having passed his surgery exams, his father died while Simpson was still a teenager. He went home to practise locally where the plight of women in childbirth made a deep impression on him. Only his family’s encouragement persuaded him to continue his studies in which he began to specialise in midwifery and obstetrics, and he made rapid progress in both fields.

Thomson records: “By the age of 24 he was publishing medical papers considered worthy of being reproduced in the main continental languages.”

Simpson became Professor of Midwifery at Edinburgh University in 1840 and, having been so affected by what he had seen in the country and increasingly in the city, where he developed a private practice, the excruciating agony suffered by his female patients in childbirth made him seek out ways of reducing that pain, and in 1846 he copied an American dentist and started using ether.

The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh states in its biography of Simpson that “on 19 January 1847, he effectively used ether during a complicated labour, but was not satisfied with the effects.

“In the summer of 1847, Simpson and his assistants, George Keith and James Matthews Duncan, began the search for new forms of anaesthetic. The three men tested numerous toxic and ineffective compounds before getting their hands on chloroform. They tested inhaling the sample and quickly fell to the ground and upon further attempts agreed chloroform was the solution they had been searching for.

‘IN November 1847, aged 36, Simpson made his Announcement of a New Anaesthetic Agent, having already successfully utilised chloroform in minor procedures. Simpson used it in obstetrics for the first time on November 8, 1847. Simpson published an account which was featured on the front page of the Scotsman.

“His pamphlets on the subject were also published in London, alerting the public to an anaesthetic that was better than ether. By the end of the year, manufacturers were struggling to supply the increasing demand for chloroform.”

There were many who objected to anaesthesia on religious grounds, but Queen Victoria used it for the birth of her son in 1853 and that was the end to all objections.

Knighted and garlanded with honours –in 1866 he was awarded the gold medal and prize of the French Academy of Sciences for “most important services rendered to humanity” – Simpson died in Edinburgh on May 6, 1870. It is said that 100,000 people lined the route of his funeral cortege.

Joseph Lister was not born in Scotland but in Essex in 1827. Nevertheless he lived most of his life here and was seen as naturalised Scot. He trained as a surgeon at Edinburgh but moved to Glasgow in 1860 and became Professor of Surgery at the Royal Infirmary.

Thomson records: “Surgical operations, however skilful, had been accompanied by a very high mortality. Lister not only traced the cause of this by his investigations in bacteriology, but, after a series of experiments carried on in Glasgow Royal Infirmary, he discovered a method of preventing this sad result by the use of carbolic acid and other substances of an ‘antiseptic’ nature, which protect the wounded surfaces from the attacks of those minute organisms to whose inroads the high death-rate had hitherto been due.

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It is no exaggeration to say that Lister’s discovery has revolutionised modern surgery and, along with Simpson’s, has rendered possible operations which, at any previous period in the world’s history, would have been considered chimerical.”

Statistics show that at Glasgow Royal Infirmary Lister’s work reduced the death rate in serious operations from 45% to 1%. He continued his work in antiseptics firstly at Edinburgh Medical School and then in London. It is no exaggeration to say that the adoption of his methods worldwide has saved the lives of hundreds of millions of people. He was made a baronet then raised to the peerage in 1897. He died in Kent in 1912.

Sir Ronald Ross’s medical science discovery also helped to save the lives of millions of people. Born in India in 1857 to a Scottish general, Ross always considered himself a Scot and he became what we know as a “lad o’pairts”, excelling at maths as a youngster but also writing poetry, which he did all his life.

His father arranged a medical scholarship in London for Ross, who was not very keen at first, but he eventually knuckled down and passed all his exams, joining the Indian Medical Service. He had come under the influence of another great medical Scot, the Aberdeenshire-born Sir Patrick Manson, known as the father of tropical medicine, whose discoveries in parasitology greatly impressed Ross.

Manson was able to show Ross that parasites caused malaria and, after catching the disease himself, Ross began his studies that led to his great breakthrough in 1897 when he proved that the malaria parasite was passed on in the bite of a mosquito. The discovery saw him awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine, the first Scot – and indeed the first person born outside Europe – to win a Nobel Prize.

Ross showed that eradicating mosquitos was the way to stop malaria spreading and he wrote the standard work The Prevention of Malaria, published in 1910, which was hugely influential in the global fight to tackle the disease.

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After spending the war years as a consultant on malaria – his son Ronald was killed on the Western Front in 1914 – in 1926 he moved to London to head the Ross Institute and Hospital for Tropical Diseases where he remained until his death on September 16, 1932.

I was not sure about whether I should include Dr Sophia Jex-Blake or Dr Elsie Inglis, but eventually plumped for Inglis – and no, she is not a token woman for she was one of the great medical pioneers.

Like Ross, she was born in India in 1864, to a Scottish magistrate in the Indian civil service. Her parents believed their daughters should have the same educational chances as their sons, which was rare in those Victorian days. So after her father retired to Edinburgh, Elsie attended the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women which Sophia Jex-Blake had opened in 1887.

But Inglis did not approve of Lex-Blake’s methods and, with her father, she founded the Edinburgh College of Medicine for Women. In 1892, she began studying the problems facing women patients at that time. Two years later, after spells in London and Dublin, she returned to Edinburgh and set up a medical practice with her friend and colleague Jessie MacLaren MacGregor.

Inglis then established the Hospice, a maternity hospital for poor women – and all the while she was a leading figure in the women’s suffrage movement. Despite opposition by senior male officers, Inglis set up the Scottish Women’s Hospitals with doctors, nurses and support staff.

The French and Serbian governments were not as misogynistic as the British state and gratefully accepted Inglis’s medical units – she remains a national hero in Serbia to this day. Her pioneering exploits in setting up field hospitals became the template for such institutions and her work was featured glowingly in the press.

While in Serbia she developed bowel cancer and died in Newcastle, on her way home to Edinburgh, on November 26, 1917.

I have written extensively before about Sir Alexander Fleming, especially when The National’s readership voted him the most iconic Scot of the 20th century. Born in Ayrshire in 1881, Fleming trained as a bacteriologist and was already a distinguished professor when, as he was working in a laboratory in London in 1928, he noticed that a mould on a petri dish had killed some samples of bacteria.

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He had discovered penicillin and though not fully aware of its significance at first, he was the genius whose work eventually saved countless millions of lives and incidentally helped the Allies win the Second World War. He received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945, the year after he was knighted. Awarded honours across the globe, Fleming died on March 11, 1955, and was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral.

Last of my Super Six is another Nobel laureate, Sir James Black. Born in Uddingston in 1924, he was raised in Fife where he attended Beath High School in Cowdenbeath. He won a scholarship to St Andrews University from which he graduated MB ChB in 1946.

He worked as a lecturer in Singapore before moving to London and then to Glasgow University, founding the Veterinary Physiology department. Studying the effects on the heart of adrenaline, he moved to work for pharmaceutical giant ICI until 1964, and while there developed the beta blocker propranolol that became the world’s best-selling drug and which eventually won Black a share of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1988.

After leaving ICI he developed cimetidine (brand name Tagamet) to treat stomach ulcers and it, too, became the world’s best-selling drug. Long associated with Dundee University, Sir James Black died in London on March 22, 2010.

Please find out more about my Super Six, a team I would bet against the world for Scotland’s reputation.