IT was in this week of 1811 that one of the greatest of all Scottish medical innovators was born in Bathgate, West Lothian.

The 210th anniversary of the birth of Sir James Young Simpson will take place on June 8, and all Scotland, and especially Scottish women, should acknowledge the birth date of a true pioneer of anaesthetics, obstetrics and gynaecology – as well as being a hospital reformer of considerable note who campaigned for midwives to be allowed to practise in hospitals. Simpson was the seventh son and eighth child of a baker, David Simpson, and his wife Mary. A precocious child, he was able to start lessons at Edinburgh University at the age of 14, and switched to studying medicine at 16, graduating and obtaining his surgery licence by the age of just 19, with his MD following two years later.

His thesis “De causa mortis in quibusdam inflammationibus proxima” about the role of inflammation in some fatal diseases was so well written that the Professor of Pathology, John Thomson, promptly employed him.

Simpson had applied to be a local doctor on Clydeside but failed to get it. He later wrote: “I felt a deeper amount of chagrin and disappointment than I have ever experienced since that date. If chosen, I would probably have been working there as a village doctor still.”

Fortunately he stayed with Thomson and the Professor suggested he should study gynaecology and midwifery.

Simpson wrote: “At Dr Thomson’s earnest suggestion and advice I first turned more especially to the study of midwifery with the view of becoming a teacher of this department of medical science.”

He had a private practice in Edinburgh that was soon full to overflowing, but it was his fame as a lecturer that grew apace.

One description of him from those days survives: “The chair was occupied by a young man whose appearance was striking and peculiar. As we entered the room his head was bent down, and little was seen but a mass of long tangled hair, partially concealing what appeared to be a head of very large size. He raised his head, and his countenance at once impressed us. A pale, rather flattish face, massive brent brows, from under which shone eyes now piercing as it were to your inmost soul, now melting into almost feminine tenderness; a coarsish nose with dilated nostrils, finely chiselled mouth which seemed the most expressive feature of the face.”

The Edinburgh Chair of Midwifery was established in 1726, the first of its kind in the UK, and probably the world. The appointment did not lie in the gift of the professors, but was entirely in the hands of the Town Council.

Simpson was determined to win the vacant chair. Realising that a wife was necessary for a suitable candidate he proposed to his cousin Janet Grindlay, known as Jessie. The tactic worked and he wrote to his new father-in-law: “I was this day elected Professor. My opponent had sixteen and I had seventeen votes. All the political influence of both the leading Whigs and Tories here was employed against me; but never mind, I have got the chair in despite of them, Professors and all. Jessie’s honeymoon and mine is to commence to-morrow.”

He was an immediate success, and the clarity of his teaching and the organisational skills he brought to places like the Royal Infirmary made him famous so that students flocked to be taught by him.

We do not know the circumstances of his own children’s birth, but this devout Christian – he was involved in the founding of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843 – did not believe that women should have to suffer the pain of childbirth. Even though leading Christians – nearly all of them men, of course – railed against those who wanted to give women pain relief, Simpson took no heed and knowing of the successful use of ether in surgery in the USA and London, he used ether himself before he carried out his famous experiment on November 4, 1847.

In his dining room, Simpson and his two friends and assistants, Dr George Skene Keith and Dr James Matthews Duncan, inhaled several substances before Simpson took out a small bottle of chloroform, which the English physician Robert Mortimer Glover had used on laboratory animals but not on humans. Having inhaled the substance, all three men became giddy and loquacious and then promptly fell unconscious. Simpson’s first thought on waking was “this is far better and stronger than ether”. Mrs Simpson’s niece Miss Petrie volunteered to “go under” and as she fell asleep she could be heard to cry “I’m an angel, I’m an angel”.

All four wakened with no side-effects, and within days, Simpson had published his account of the experiment. Within a few weeks, Simpson was using chloroform to anaesthetise women in childbirth. News of his innovation spread, and women travelled from all over to have their children in Edinburgh under his direction. He was honoured by being made one of the Queen’s Physicians in Scotland and it was Victoria herself who blew away all the remaining opposition to Simpson’s anaesthesia when she used chloroform during the birth in 1853 of Prince Leopold.

Simpson had many other achievements. He designed a set of forceps named after him – they are still in use today – and became one of the great experts on leprosy. He was an acknowledged expert on everything from medicine in Roman Britain to ancient sculpturing.

On his death in 1870 at the age of 58, his family was offered the opportunity to have Simpson buried in Westminster Abbey, but they declined and 100,000 people lined the streets of Edinburgh to pay their respects as his body was taken to Warriston Cemetery.