The Contributions Made by Louis Pasture, Florence Nightingale and James Simpson to Medical Science

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The Contributions Made by Louis Pasture, Florence Nightingale and James Simpson to Medical Science

James young who was professor of midwifery at Edinburgh University,

experimented on himself and his assistants to find a more effective

anaesthetic than ether which had been developed in the USA but had

been found to cause a nasty cough to patients. In 1847 he tested

chloroform and found it to be a much less potent substance than ether.

He reported his discoveries, but without a proper system of regulation

in place, the substance was misused and caused the death of a

15-year-old girl by another doctor. The medical profession became less

sceptical however, when in 1853 Queen Victoria was successfully

anaesthetised with chloroform during the birth of her ninth child and

the procedure one again became commonly used. As a result, Simpson was

awarded a baronetcy in 1866.

Simpson’s work was revolutionary in that it took away the pain from

surgery. At this time it was widely accepted that it was the ‘shock of

the knife’ that kept the patient alive. By taking away the pain of

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