MEMORIES OF SIMPSON.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10275, 30 June 1911, Page 4

MEMORIES OF SIMPSON.

Apropos of the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Sir Jiameis Young Sampson, the discoverer of anoesithetic&j mentioned in recent cablegrams, there resides in Gover Street, North Adelaide, a niece of the great surgeon, Miss Simpson, who recollects the experiment days of chloroform away back in the forties. "We lived in Edinburgh," she informed a reporter of uhv "Register," "and I remember my t. James as a. nice, kind man. He lia a great horror of seeing people in pain, and this led to Ms efforts to discover something to alleviate their sufferings. He and. his assistants, after having worked, for some time, hit upon the anaesthetic one evening. How it came about I cannot say now, but when. I wias about 10 I remember him coming to father's house, and giving him a Bt-

tie sniff of it. He seemed to go off into a beautiful sleep. It appealed to us as being very funny, and my foither, who had returned from a train journey, said it made him feel as though he had been driving the engine. We children began -to look for chloroform whenever we had any pain, and, in fact, we thought • we might take it for toothache. As we grew older, however, we decided that we had better not experiment any more. Of eour.se, chloroform in those days was not as pure as it lias come to be latterly, but we suffered no ill-effects."