After warning his audience against regarding the gaining of the coveted degree as the end of their student career, instead of as in reality the opening up of a lifetime of observation and study, he pointed out that self-patronage was the best of all patronage. “Place from the first,” he said, “all your hopes of advancement upon the breadth and extent of your medical abilities alone.... Rather walk by the steady light of 75 your own lamp than by the more dazzling, but to you more uncertain, lustre borrowed from that of others ... Young physicians often dream that by extending the circle of their private acquaintances they thus afford themselves the best chance of extending the circle of their private patients.... No man will in any case of doubt and danger entrust to your professional care the guardianship of his own life or of the life of those who are near and dear to his heart, merely because you happen to be on terms of intimacy with him. The self-interest of human nature forbids it.... The accomplishments which render you acceptable in the drawing-room are not always those that would make your visits longed for or valued in the chamber of sickness and sorrow.... Give therefore your whole energies to medicine; and in its multiplied departments you will find ‘ample room and verge enough’ for the most energetic as well as the most comprehensive mind. Place your faith in no extrinsic influences. Let your own professional character be the one great patron to whom you ever look for your professional advancement.” He exhorted the young practitioners above all to save and economise their time, and to regard it as a property to be avaricious of and of every item of which they were to render a proper account to themselves. “It is by carefully preserving, confirming, and making diligent use of these broken and disjointed portions of it, which others thoughtlessly waste and destroy, that almost all the highest reputations in the 76 medical profession have been formed.” He strongly urged the value of a “proper covetousness of time.” “Look around, and you will find that those who have the most to do in the way of business as practitioners have also apparently the most time to spare as observers and writers.... And why? Because they have all their daily duties perfectly assorted and arrayed; they save from loss and destruction every possible fragment of time and this very industry and precision procures them more true leisure than indolence can boast of.”
In referring to the relation of practitioner to patient, he spoke on a subject which has been much discussed in recent years without altering the principle originally laid down in the oath of Hippocrates:—“Whatever,” said Simpson, “is communicated to you as a matter of professional confidence, must ever remain buried within your own breasts in all the silence and secrecy of the grave.” He concluded his address with well-judged remarks on the relation of the physician to his professional brethren, counselling his hearers to observe the Golden Rule, and, moreover, “if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men; never allow the darker part of your nature to persuade you to the attempt of over-taking him who has distanced you in the race of life by any unjust efforts to lame the character, and thus diminish the speed, of your adversary. And if such attempts are made upon you by others, have no dread of them—if you are armed strong in honesty, if you 77 have pursued a line of irreproachable truth and unbending rectitude of conduct. ‘Be thou as pure as snow thou shalt not escape calumny.’... Your future career is a matter of your own selection, and will be regulated by the conduct which you choose to follow. That career may be one of happiness or self-regret, one of honour or of obscurity, one of wealth or of poverty. The one or other result is not a matter of chance, but a matter of choice on your part. Your diligence and industry for the next few years will almost inevitably secure for you the one; your apathy and indolence will almost inevitably entail upon you the other. May God, in His infinite goodness, enable you to select the wiser and the better path.”
In this address, as in that previously quoted, we hear him exhorting his young listeners to a line of conduct which we know to have been broadly his own in practice as well as in ideal. During these early years as professor, Simpson had to ward off many ill-disposed adversaries, and he met their attack with the determination and powerful preparedness that characterised his attitude in later years, when he experienced the hostility so constantly opposed to genuine reformers, and men who have lived ahead of their times. He sometimes regarded these encounters regretfully himself; but none the less remembered to
“Bear’t that the opposed may beware.”
The correspondence pertaining to some of these 78 disputes was filed and ticketed, with brief contempt, “Squabbles.” His controversy with Professor Syme over a personal matter in 1845 was not to the credit of either of these great men, and, as Simpson himself confessed, was equally discreditable to their profession. Simpson had seen, as has been pointed out, several of his teachers fighting long and strongly for their own cherished objects; and he doubtless then, in his student days, learnt the lesson that vigorous persistence had the power to gain much that at first seemed hopeless; he fought with such energy, that he accomplished in his own lifetime what the example of others might have led him to think would have been accomplished only by his successors.
The growth of his practice up to 1847 was little short of phenomenal. In 1845 he purchased No. 52, Queen-street, the house which he inhabited up to his death, and which became the Mecca of hundreds upon hundreds of pilgrims from all quarters of the globe. Here, in those years, he was sought and consulted by unceasing crowds; in the public mind he was undoubtedly endowed with more than human powers, and regarded as a magician, at the wave of whose wand pain and disease would vanish. This caused him much embarrassment, and brought upon him the abuse of ignorant persons, irritated to find that, after all, even in Simpson’s person, there was a limit to human powers; or of others with unimportant ailments who were disappointed to find that, once 79 having made his diagnosis of their condition, he would have no more of them, preferring to place his time at the disposal of those whose sufferings were real and capable of relief, or whose cases were complicated and interesting. The question of remuneration was always secondary, and so careless was he in pecuniary matters that it is related that he would wrap up interesting specimens, professional or antiquarian, in bank notes; and his trusted valet was in the habit of emptying his pockets at night of the money earned in the day, to prevent its being lost, mislaid, or given away to undeserving persons. With him work was first and fee second. Like a great modern teacher he was able to say, “Work first—you are God’s servant; fee first—you are the fiend’s.” To Simpson “work was master and the Lord of Work, who is God.”
The personal power and attractiveness of the man were large factors in gaining the practice which he now enjoyed. But he did not depend for success on these alone, by any means. His professional reputation was fully won by great work in obstetrics and gynæcology, and by the introduction of methods and instruments which contributed to the saving of countless lives. It has been said that he gave a new life to the obstetric art, and presided at the birth of gynæcology. He had done this before the great deed was dreamt of which hands his name down to posterity, before his discovery of the anæsthetic power of chloroform. Simpson was a great physician, the 80 leading practitioner of the art and exponent of the science with which his name will always be connected. But many great physicians have failed to fulfil as Simpson did, Robert Louis Stevenson’s description of the physician:—
“Generosity he has such as is possible to those who practise an art, never to those who drive a trade; discretion tested by a hundred secrets; tact tried in a thousand embarrassments; and what are more Heraclean cheerfulness and courage. So it is that he brings air and cheer into the sick room, and often enough, though not so often as he wishes, brings healing.”
Great as a man and great as a physician, Simpson was actually run after by the greatest in the land. In 1845 he was summoned professionally to London, and gave an interesting description of his kindly reception by the Duchess of Sutherland and her family in a letter written from Stafford House. His advent to London was a matter of notoriety, and he noted that he bought in the street a life of himself which mightily diverted him and made him laugh until he was sore. A year or more later he was invited for rest and change to Erskine House by Lord Blantyre, where he says, “the Duchess of Sutherland, the Marquis and Marchioness of Lorne, and two Ladies Gower have made up with myself all the strangers.” “Tell Janet,” he wrote to his brother, “I think now artificial flowers very ungenteel. The ladies here 81 wear nothing but real flowers in their hair, and every day they come down with something new and for us males to guess at. Often the Duchess wears a simple chaplet of ivy leaves, sometimes a bracken leaf is all she sports in her head ornaments, and beautiful it looks. Rowans and ‘haws’ are often worn beaded into crowns or flowers or chaplets. Heather is also a favourite. On Thursday Lady Lorne came down with a most beautiful chaplet tying round and keeping down her braided hair. It was a long bunch of bramble leaves and half-ripe bramble berries—actual true brambles. They have been all exceedingly kind to me, and I really feel quite at home among them though the only untitled personage at table.”
The daily scene at 52, Queen Street was now unique. Those who had the fortune to lunch or breakfast in that hospitable house never forgot it. Statesmen, noblemen, artists, scientists, clergymen, and politicians from various countries sat down together and entertained each other or attempted to do so in their different languages. The host guided the conversation while he still glanced over the newspaper or some newly published book, and never failed by skilful leading to entice out of every one the best knowledge that they possessed. With his quick insight he rarely failed in his estimate of character, but rapidly perceived even in a stranger where the conventional ceased and the real man began.