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DEATH OF SIR JAMES SIMPSON.

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DEATH OF SIR JAMES SIMPSON. It is with deep regret that we announce the death of Sir James Yonng Sitiu H"D, B irt., Pro'"essor of Mid- wifery in the Edinburgh TJuivermty. aud discoverer of the &I-m-tbttieproper-iei of chlortf<>rm. This distinguished physician, who, it will be re- membered, was oil. of the wltuesSPR called to prove tbe insanity of Lady Mordaunt on the 16oh February last, died at Edinburgh, at ten minutes to eig* t o'et< ck on Friday nighf:, of disease of the heart. He halt been ill for about two months, one week seeming much better, and another worse. About three days previous to his decease, however, bis strength begaa rapidly to fail, aud 1 hou. h it was tioped that such an ornament to the medical profession might have been sj ared, he gradually ank, and has died in the 59 in year of his a je. The deceased, perhaps the most eminent man in tbe orofefisi<>n ae an obstetrician, was tne "on of Mr. Divia StfM son, of B ithgate, n-ar Edinhurgh, ai d Was horn in 1811. He was educated at the Ediu) uruhUniverbity, where he took his degree of M.D. in 1832. Hi began his professional life as asut*nt to the late Professor Thomson, and in the outset of his career displayed a strength and energy which ensured his rapid rise to eminence. In 1840 he was appointed Proftssor of Mid. wifery in the University of Edinburgh—a post which he continued to fill until his death. Seven years after his appointment he introduced chloroform into the practice of his profession, and since that peiiud he has demonstrated, as the result of long experience, the value and the safety of antithetic midwifery. In 1819, Dr. Simpson was elected President of the Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians in 1852, President of the Medical Chirurgical Society in the following year, under highly complimentary circumstances, Foreign Associate of the French Academy of Medicine. In 1856 the French Academy of Sciences awarded the Montyon Prize of 2,000f. to Dr. Simpson for the benefits which ne had conferred upon humanity through the intro. duction of anaesthesia by chloroform into the practice of surgery and midwifery. A few weeks earlier he re- ceived, on account of the same discovery, the knight- hood of the Royal Order of St. Olaff, from King Oscar of Sweden. His numerous professional writings deal- ing with those branches of medical science of which he was so great a master, have been translated into every European language, and are known in every civilized land. In January, 1866, when Lord Russell's Government was in power, the deceased physician was created Sir James Simpson, Baronet, of the City of Edinburgh and of Strathnavon, Linlithgowshire. In the same year the University of Oxford conferred upon him the honorary degree of D.C.L and at out the sime time he was appointed Physician Accoucheur to the Queen for Scotland. The list of honorary offices which he held in his native kingdom, and in the Academies of Medicine of France, Belgium, New York, Sweden, Egypt, Constantinople, Athens, Bohemia, Norway' Stockholm, Copenhagen, Ghent, Massachusetts, Lima' and Bombay, testify to the greatness of his intellect and to the splendour of his renown. Sir James was married in 1839 to Jessie, daughter of Mr. Walter Grindlay, of Liverpool, and his eldest our. viving son Walter succeeds to the title. A GREAT BSNiyACTOB SHOULD BE REMEMBERED. A correspondent throws out the following hint in The Tmt.e, Twenty-five years ago the operating theatre of an hospital was to the public a thing of indescribable drtad, while in private practice the approach of the surgeon with his instru- memts of torture struck terror into countless households. This dread is gone,—this terror is past. To one man we owe this great charge and unspeakable good. I well recollect Sir James Simpson, soon after the period I have named, coming to my house fresh from the amputation of the leg of a child, and describing how the little fellow had been thrown into a gentle slumber through the eftects of ether, the imme- diate precursor of chloroform; hof he was taken from his bed into an adjoining room, and how, on being replaced after the operation in his cot, the return of consciousness brought with it no knowledge of what he had undergone. Think," said Sir James, what the scene would have been without the blessed influence of ether." What ether then aid chloroform, with which the name of Simpson is Inseparably linked, has done and will, we may hope, in endless case* continue to do, but he through whose immediate agency this heaven-sent gift of freedom from pain in moments of otherwise terrible agony has thus been conferred on man is now no more. We have this day read the announcement of his death. A light has gone out of the world. Surely, then, some steps will be taken to mark the world's sense of his services and loss, for it is not his countrymen and countrywomen alone, but the whole human race that are his debtors. As a tribute to the memory of this truly great bene- factor of the human family, the Daily Telegraph, in » leader, says In K linburgh last week there died a man who was the greatest conqueror in human history. He did not fight with battHllons against battalions, his weapons were not cruel and deadly, and his foes was no guiltless people or helpless country, whose beauty and fertility were made its crimes. He waged his glorious war against our common enemY-hi- compassionate heart and ht. capacious brain were his arsenal and armoury, and his triumphs, instead of being bought by weeping and anguish, have stayed flood of tears, and pre- vented a world of agony. There are those who names are in themselves heraldry and when nine-tenths of the notorieties of our time are as much forgotten by the world as though they had never existed, "James Simpson must be known and held in loving recollection and honour by every nation of the earth, as one to whom humanity owes a debt so great that It can be paid only by ranking him for ever with the chief benefactors and noblest servants of the race. We are instructed that the last enemy" which shall be destroyed is death, albeit as yet that splendid promise is in- comprehensible. But death had an ally, bitter, mysterious, and merciless, which seemed equally invincible, and lent death halt its horrors, and cast upon life itself the shadow of an infinite fear. Fain stalked through the world with authority, apparently for ever and ever, to rack our nerves and torture our senses—there were times, it seemed, when all" ho live must be dflivered over to its tyranny. lathe slow developments of dlaease-inthe day of accident to the frame—in the operations of the surgeon's room and the hospital theatre—in the sufferings of childbirth—and all the many grievous ills that flesh is heir to—the alleviation. known were feeble and fleeting; the agony had been endured through all generations, and there was no sign that it would not be endured for all generations to come. Who can estimate the mass—the universe of preventible anguish endured through past ajzea while mankind waited for James Simpson ? Look at ihe«>ld picture* of the operating room • Look at th« cockpits of Nelson'* atalpa, where tbey used to plunfre the bleeding stumps of poor sailors- into boil- in* pl'ch to stay the hemorrhage During eighteen hundred Md forty-seven years from the birth of Christ, and ages before that birth, the earth had groaned in the presence of this In- scrutable Pain which couId not be avoided or greatly mitigated by any narcoti 's or anodynes, but wh'ch made the surgeon's knife more dreadful than death, and seemed, indeed, to confirm the doctrine that the other- wise beautiful proce.s of birth wis for ever coupled with a hideous curse. Then, after all those years the hour came and the man: James Simpson was one of the foremost pioneers in giving chloroform its widest and most essential application. The gain hu been priceless, and at that one pitiful word from Science, Pain, the despot, was dead. Aches, and hurts, and disease, indeed, remained; but the human race was no longer subject to indefinite agony -we were lords, and no longer slaves, of our mysterious capacity to endure. Nature had whispered her merciful secret into the ear of her loving votary, and thrice happy < o be her messenger, he told it joyously to us, wherefore half the fear and sorrow of mortal life was annihilated by the subtle liquid which he gave us. It is, of course, well known that James Simpson was not the actual inventor of the priceless gift. As is the case of all great discoveries, ingenious minds had preceded nim, and led up to the moment when the new blessing could be proclaimed for general use Sulphuric ether bad been already largely employed, and, If one is to go back to the first men- tion of ansssihetics, It appears, from a passage in the Odyssey, as If Homer knew that some such divine power existed in chemistry; for we find Helen, at the court 01 Menelaus, administering a wonderful drup, obtained from Egypt, which caused wounded and am cted men to forget their pain" But what the dead physician did was to take the wonderful gift from the hands of Science, experimentalise upon it personally, perceive its admirable qualities, and boldly declare the time arrived when, in a vast number of cases, pain should be placed under the control of the sufferer and of his attendants. Some day, we trust, a true account will be printed of those memorable evenings when Simpson, Waldie, and Keith sat together, in Edinburgh, inhaling the new anodyne, and inflicting benevo- lent pinches and pricks upon each other while the potent vapour "lulled the spirit in oblivion." Some day a worths painter, we trust, will preserve in noble colours that season of splendid experiment wherefrom resulted the bold an- nouncement which, at one word, dissociated the primal curse from childbirth, and went far to banish agony and horror from the operating room. "In sorrow shall she bring forth," had been written, and read like a sentence of dreadful meaning, against half-and the weakest half-of our ™«r. all the while Science was waiting to let us know T^! __e.r?ihy'g upon the «' tree of knowledge a fruit which fl>T „ 60 t"at doom. No mystery, nothing verj occult when r*rhn«°i!j £ bysician had once got it from the chemist—just lo 1 ? chlorine dexterously commingled; aud wftifB slumber through the keenest pangs, and » ditheI 3oy realised and her travail past by. The £ p^ n t° whom a choice was offered between the ♦1? wnl the grave, might fearlessly commit himself to the skill of the good surgeon, and before the dreacful instruments were bared, his spirit lay bathed in the gentle sleep of chloroform, and returned to find pain past like a dream and healthy life given back to him. Yet there were those who opposed the benignant gift on the ground—the monstrous ground — that God had appointed pain to be our heritage. Blind propagandists of the fetish faltbs which once sacrificed children to ttoloc h, an cut and burned the body to please the gods, such men for- bade the new blessing to humanity, and would have had mothers bear still the curse, and men writhe always under the saw and amputating scalpel. The gentle disposition of James Simpson used to lose its patience a little when he spoke of those strange Christians, but he has lived to see his labours to thoroughly accepted that no single day passed when thousands of sufferers throughout the earth did not owe to him life, or at least a blessed manumission from its anguish. Now he is dead—the brilliant Scotch doctor, with the large head which held such a glorious brain, and the lion- Wte locks which covered it. It is part of the mystery of things that he was killed by angina pectoris-tbe breast- Pang, which is perhaps the very keenest agony that can be borae by mortal man, at least during Its paroxysm*. Never- theless, on his death-bed his own beneficent anc-ithetic greatly assuaged his sufferings, realising that Eastern legend which says that the good deeds of a man gather round him in the shape of angels, aid make his dissolution easy. The Urne will doubtless come when chloroform as an anodyne will be replaced by more perfect methods of abolishing pain. in its practical working it canses a reaction which is not de- slrable and tiie art of healing is seeking a better antei- thetic by the aid of many gifted experimentalists, like yr- -Richardson and others, who inherit the mantle of the dead philosopher. Already in nitrous oxide, ether spray, aud chloral, medicine possesses developments of the branch cf inquiry which have new and most valuable properties; and it may be hoped that pain will some day be permitted to exist only as a mere useful index or momentary monitor. But if ever we shoul I thus pass wholly out of the gum region of physical suffering in which we are already no longer prisoners without hope or remedy, the name of this 'good phyBieian" must stand first upon tbe roll of our de- liverers To him, as the brave and ardentrflUsionary ofchloro- form will always be awarded the chief merit for first announcing the fact that pain. like all other evil, endures only by reason of our ignorance, and is controllable by our better knowledge. And as the process of time allots to this beautiful life Its proper historical lustre, and makes it clear how great a benefactor we of this century have had dwelling among us, 'will seem a noble aud glorious destiny to have been thus chosen from amongst meu to banish pain, and to have lived and died the personal friend of every human creature, present and to come.

AN EVANGELICAL SISTERHOOD.I

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