His father-in-law generously and willingly stood by him until the fees began to come in more freely—his brother Sandy, who had supported him hitherto, having now other claims upon his purse. He found two ordinary but costly steps advisable—first, to move into a better and more centrally situated house; and, secondly, to obtain a carriage, “both to support my rank among my wealthier compeers and to save my body from excess of work.” The outlay was justified in the result; the fees from students and from his private practice very soon enabled him to repay the debts to his brothers and his father-in-law without inconvenience 69 and with grateful pleasure. Once and for ever within the first few years of his professorship he placed himself in a safe position, free from all pecuniary anxiety.
If he had laboured hard to fit himself for the front rank of his profession, his work on attaining that position showed increase rather than abatement. His private practice alone was the work of more than one ordinary individual, and his professorial duties took up some of the best hours of his day. In the evenings and at all odd times he busied himself with absorbing current or ancient literature, or in preparing his own contributions to both professional and general knowledge either with the pen or by experiment. “Oh that there were double twenty-four hours in the day,” he sighed at a time when he was working at highest pressure, practising amongst peers, commoners, and cottagers alike, who all flocked to his residence or sent long distances for him. When Princess Marie of Baden, wife of the Duke of Hamilton, came under his special care in 1843 he felt that he was placed at the top of his profession in Scotland, and must have smilingly recalled the words of old Dr. Dawson, of Bathgate, when he heard of the successful contest for the Chair. “It’s all very well,” he had said, “to have got the Chair! But he can never have such a practice as Professor Hamilton. Why, ladies have been known to come from England to consult him!”
They came from the furthest parts of Greater Britain to consult Hamilton’s successor, in spite of the old doctor’s prognostication!
The energy as well as the versatility of the man is well shown in the works which he found time to carry on while he was thus establishing himself as a teacher and as a practitioner, during the years from 1840 to 1845. One of his first literary efforts, not wholly professional, the Memoir on “Leprosy and Leper-Houses,” was produced at that time. It was a work of relaxation and pleasure, for it carried him deeply into his favourite archæology. The fascination which this subject always had for him sprang from his love of nature, and of the greatest work of nature—man. “The leading object and intent of all the antiquarian’s pursuit is MAN,” he said, “and man’s ways and works, his habits and thoughts, from the earliest dates at which we can find his traces and tracks upon the earth, onwards and forwards along the journey of past time. During this long journey he has everywhere left scattered behind him and around him innumerable relics forming so many permanent impressions and evidences of his march and progress.”
The quantity and quality of the information concerning leper hospitals which he collected and embodied in his memoir, contributed to the Edinburgh Medico-Chirurgical Society in March, 1841, was phenomenal. He had consulted old manuscripts and registers, monastic chronicles, burgh records, and Acts 71 of Parliament, as well as works of antiquity, travel, and history. He gave close upon five hundred references, as well as a list of one hundred and nineteen leper-houses, whose existence in Britain and whose history he had traced. The work illustrates the objects and proper methods of antiquarian research, which twenty years afterwards he dilated upon in his address from the Chair of the Scottish Society of Antiquaries. In the course of it he pointed out how vigorously our ancestors had set to work to stamp out the disease when it spread through Europe during the period from the tenth to the sixteenth century. The method adopted was that still employed—segregation; about the twelfth century scarcely a town or burgh in France and Britain was without its leper-hospital. Although we in Britain are happily now freed from its ravages, other parts of the world are not so fortunate. It is still regarded popularly as an incurable disease, as it was in 1597, when one Catherine Livingstone was gravely brought to trial for witchcraft, one instance of which had been that she dared to state her ability to cure “leprosie, which the maist expert men in medicine are not abil to do.” The indictment set forth that she “took a reid cock, slew it, baked a bannock with the blude of it, and gaf the samyn to the leper to eat.” The witch’s remedy is scarcely more curious and certainly no less useful than those recommended two centuries later by John Wesley in his “Primitive Physic,” where, moreover, he cheerfully, 72 if somewhat too briefly to satisfy the modern inquirer, reports the cure “of a most desperate case” by the drinking of a half-pint of celery-whey morning and evening.
Scotland was severely smitten by leprosy in the centuries when it overspread Europe; Robert Bruce fell a victim to it in 1339, and the disease seems to have lingered in the North after it had almost vanished from England.
Simpson’s paper was published in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal in three parts in 1841 and 1842, and to this day is the most valuable contribution to the interesting and important history of the disease. Some of the information had been collected in his student days. In his antiquarian researches he had frequently met with references to the dirty and unwholesome habits and surroundings of Scots towns in early days. The thought that dirt and disease were directly connected—a new thought even so recently as fifty years ago—led to his investigations. He found that leprosy was most prevalent at the time when his country was most dirty; but he was not able to establish his supposition that the cause of the disease lay in the insanitary surroundings of the people; indeed his researches proved that, on the contrary, leprosy had declined and practically disappeared from the country long before any material improvement in sanitary conditions took place.
Simpson’s conduct when Professor Thomson resigned 73 the Chair of Pathology illustrates the vigour with which he entered into quite casually arising incidents where he saw that strength and a fight were necessary to conquer an evil or prevent an abuse. Thomson resigned in 1841 owing to ill-health. The Chair had been established by William IV. in 1831 on the representations of Thomson himself, who succeeded in satisfying Lord Melbourne that the subject was worthy of the dignity of a separate Chair, in spite of the protests of the Senatus Academicus, who throughout the history of the medical faculty generally appear to have been actuated more by personal considerations and professional jealousies, where new developments were in process, than by zeal for their Alma Mater. Professors Syme and Alison actively led an agitation that with Thomson’s resignation the separate teaching of pathology should be brought to an end. Without a moment’s hesitation, in the midst of his hard work, and suffering from indifferent health, Simpson plunged into a controversy with these colleagues, in which he silenced at once and for ever the detractors who had sneered at him as an ignorant, uncultured man-midwife. The controversy as usual was followed with intense interest by Edinburgh folks, and Simpson received a first taste of that popular approval which undoubtedly was one of the enjoyments of his life. The Crown avoided the difficulty of deciding between the rival petitioners for and against the Chair by transferring its patronage to the Town Council, who 74 showed the same foresight which had led them to appoint Simpson, in deciding to maintain its existence. Unfortunately their wisdom failed when they elected as Thomson’s successor a man who, although of brilliant attainments, subsequently brought discredit upon his University and himself by becoming a convert to homœopathy. Simpson, who was indirectly instrumental in securing the Chair of Pathology for this man became his bitterest opponent when he declared himself a follower of Hahnemann’s unorthodox and mistaken doctrines.
In 1842 it fell to Simpson’s lot to deliver the customary address to the medical graduates after they had received their degrees at the annual ceremonial on the 1st of August. He treated his listeners to a discourse on the duties of young physicians. When we remember that he had attained to his then high professional position while he was no more than a young physician himself, we recognise that he was but setting forth the ideals and principles which had been and still were his guides in life and conduct.