The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1870-05-14 00:00:00

As a tribute to the memory of this truly great bene-
factor of the human family, the Lady Tdcgraph, in a
leader,. says :7.

_
In Edinburgh last week there died a man who was the
greatest conqueror in human history. Ho dig net light with
battalions against battalions, hit welpOtlS wet.r ad
deadly, and his foe "us no -s
country, whose beauty awl fen- were .
He waged lli4 glorious war against our common enemy—hie
compassionate heart and his capacious br.du were his arsenal
and armoury, and his triumphs, Instead of ',Aim bought by
weeping and anguish, have stayed floods of tears, and pre-
vented a world of agony.... There are those who names are
in themselves heraldry ; anti 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
neXon of the earth, as one to whom humanity owes I debt

so great that it can be pad 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 Set that splendid promise is in.
compreheneible. But death had an ally, bitter. mysterious,
sod merciless, which seemed equally Invincible, and lent
death half its horrors, and cast upon life itself the shadow'
of an infinite fear. ran stalked through tie world with,
authority, apparently for ever and ever, to rack ma nerves,
and forlorn our neuter—there were times, it seemed, when'
all who live west
,be d'-livered o'er to Pe teranet tu the
glow clevelopmente of iiiaease—in tile day of ;incident to 'he,
frame—in the operations of the surgem's room and the,
heseital theatre—hr the sufferine!s of childbirth—and all the
marl grieveas ills that flesh is heir to—the alleviateme,
known were feeble arid fleeting; the agony had been endured
through all generatioue, and there was no alga that it would
not be endured for all generations to come.
Who can es' im et° the mass—the universe of preventible
anguish endured through past ages While nmekind waited
for James Simpson Look at the old pictures of the operating
room! Look at the cockpits of ;Tolson's skies, where tipsy
used to plums° the bleedieg stumps of poor salient Into be!l-
Mg pitch to stay the luentorrbage ! During eighteen hundred
and forty-seven years from the birth of Christ, and ages before
that birth, the earth had groaned in the presence of this hie
serutaele Pein which could not be avoided or greatly
mitigated by any riarceti a or anodynes, but which made
the surgeon's knife more dreadful than death, and
seemed, indeed, to confirm the doctrine that the other-
wise beautiful procem of birth was 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
anil most essential applieation. The gain has beers priceless,
and at that 'me NUM' word from Selene°, exits. the despot,
was eeeil. Ace; es, and Wart., and diseese, ludeederenashred ;
but the human race was no longer sublect to indeenite afreue
—we were hires, and no longer slaves, if our mysterious
capacity to endure. Nature had whispered her merciful
secret Into the ear of her loving votary, and thrice happy to
be her meseenger, he told it joyously to us, whork fere half
the fear arid sorrow of mortal life was annihilated by the
subtle liquid whigh he gave U.
It is, or course. Well kn.. that James Simpson was not
the actual inventor of the priceless gift. As is the case of
all great rinceveries, ingenieus minds had preieded him,
and led up to the moment when the new bleesitig could he
Proclaimed for general use Sulphuric ether had been already
largely employed, and, if one is to go back to the first mere
Don of areecheties, It appeers, from a passage in the
Oilyseey, as if Heiner knew that some retch divine power
existed in chemistry ; for we find Helen, at the court of
Menelaus, administering a wonderful drib, obtained from
Egypt, which "caused wounded and efilicted men to
forget their pain." But what the dead physician did
was to take the wonderful gift from the heeds
of Science, experimentalise upon it personally, perceive its
admirable quelities, and beldly declare the time arrived
when, in e vast nuteber of case., ,pain should be placed under
the centrol of the sufferer and of his attendants. Some day,
es trust, a true isecorint will be printed of thee, memorable
eventrige when Simpson, Wilhite, and Keith sat togetheri iii
Eilihburgh, inhaling the new anodyne, and inflicting beneeo-
lent pinches and pricks upon each other while the potent
vapour "hulled the spirit in oblivion " Some day a worthy
painter, we trust, will preserve in noble colours that season
of spleno id experiment wherefrom resulted the bold an-
nouncement which, at one word, Associated the primal
curse from childbirth, and went far to banish agony and
horror from the operating room. "lii sorrow shall she
bring forth," had been aflame and read like a sentence of
dreadful meaning, against half—and the weakest hall—el our
kind. Yet all the while Science was waiting to lotus know
that there hung upon the "tree of knowledge" a trait which
reversed that doom. No mystery, nothing very occult when
the good physician had once got it from the chemist—fast
carbon, hydrogen, and chlorine dexteromly commingled ; and
tot the mother might slumber theough the keenest pangs, and
wake to tind her My realised rind her travail past by. The
trembling patient, to Whom a choice won offered between the
knife and the grave, might fearlessly commit himself to
the skill of the good sureeon, and before the drew fat
Instruments were hared, his spirit lay bathed in the
gentle sleep of chin-firm, and retnrned 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 groun I—the monstrous growl that God had
app i anted pain to be elm heritage. Bled prepagandiste of
the fetish faiths which micemserificed children to itoloc h, an
cut and burned the body to please the goes, such men for-
bade the mew bleerieg to hurnauity, and would have had
mothers bear stet the cress, end men writhe always under
the saw and amputating scalpel The gentle dieposition 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 so thoroughly accepted that no single day passed
when thousands of sufferers throughout the earth did riot
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 glorimus brain, and the nun-
like locks which covered it. It is part of the mystery of
things that he was killed by angina pectoris—the "breast
pang," which is perhaps the very keenest agony that can he
berne liy mortal roan, at least during Ito paroxysms. Never-
thelesa on hie death-bed his oar; beneficent amesthetic
greatly stsuaged hie sufferings, realising that Eastern legend
which @eye that the good deed• of a man gather round him
in the shape of angels, sod make his dissolution easy. The
time will doubtless mine when chloroform as an anodyne
will be replaced by more perfect methods of abolishing pain.
In its practical working it onuses a reaction which is ant de-
sireble ; and tile net of heeling is seeking a better •11Fei•
thetic by the aid of many gifted experimentalists, like
Dr. Richardson and others, who inherit the mantle of the
need philosopher. Already its nitrous oxide, ether spray,
and chloral, medicine possesses developments of the '
branch et inquiry which have new and most valuable
properties; and it may be hoped that pain will some day be
permitted to exist wily as a niece useful index or momentary
monitor. Put if ever we shooi'l thus pass wholly out of the
grim region of pbysital miff ertne itt whieh we no already no
longer prisoners without hope or remedy, the name of this
" good physician" must stand first upon the roll of our de-
liverers. To him, as the brave and ardent missionary of chloro-
form will always be awarded thechleemerit for first announcing
the fact that pain, like all other evil, endures only by reason of
our ignorance, atolls 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 •
benefactor we of this ceirtury have had dwelling among us,
it will seem a noble and glorione destiny to have been thus
chosen frem amongst men to banish pain, and to have lived
and died the personal friend of every human creature,
present and to tome. . •