DISCOVERY 



69 



visiting Edinburgh. Here, assisted by his devoted 

 disciples, he began to trv all sorts of liquids on himself 

 and his assistants in the hope of discovering the ideal. 

 A certain Mr. WiUdie, a Liverpool chemist, who ori- 

 ginally came from Simpson's own county, suggested 

 chloroform as a likely liquid for the purp>ose. Simjjson 

 had already had some chloroform, but had set it aside 

 as being heavy and unpromising for the purpose. 

 The bottle containing the heavy oily liquid was ac- 

 cordingly fished out again from numbers of others and 

 its contents sampled. It was on the 4th of November 

 1S47 that the discovery was made that this unpro- 

 mising, sweet-smelling liquid would do all that was 

 required of it and do it extremely well. Chloroform had 

 been discovered by Liebig in 1831, and independently 

 b\' Soubeiran in the same year. 



Now began the usual battle that we have already 

 witnessed in the case of Pasteur ' and Lister,* a battle 

 against ignorance, prejudice, and professional jealousy. 

 Simpson, unlike Pasteur, who was worried by his 

 opponents, entered the contest with the keenest 

 delight, and wrote long dissertations, often in 

 a humorous vein, to confound his enemies, making 

 them appear ridiculous in the eyes of the world. 



His greatest delight was to fight them with their own 

 weapons ; thus he met those who objected on religious 

 grounds by quoting Genesis ii. 21, " And the Lord God 

 caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam ; and he slept, 

 and He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh 

 instead thereof." By April 1853 the victory had been 

 completely won, for then the Queen was anaesthetised 

 with chloroforfn. The methods of administration of 

 chloroform at Edinburgh were so e.xceUent that they 

 have remained unchanged to this day, and practically 

 no other anaesthetic is used in that school. The 

 discovery of anaesthesia, and more particularly the 

 discoverv of chloroform, caused a complete revolution 

 in the field of surgery and obstetric practice, coming 

 as it did almost simultaneously with Lister's great 

 discovery of antisepsis. The two together rendered 

 surgery not only comparatively safe, but also painless. 

 The whole atmosphere of the operating theatre was 

 completelv changed from a scene of horror resembling 

 a shambles, to the calm and peace that surrounds the 

 surgeons of to-day in the orderly theatres of our great 

 hospitals. Simpson narrowly escaped fame from an 

 entireh" different discovery- of a means of stopping the 

 bleeding of the severed arteries in major operations. 

 Hitherto these had been tied with silk of doubtful 

 cleanliness, which as often as not set up local blood- 

 poisoning. Simpson devised a method known as 

 " acupressure," which was, however, superseded by 

 Lister's antiseptic soluble ligatures. Simpson's work 

 on Hospitalism, long before Lister's discovery had 



• Disco\i;rv, November 1920. 'Discov-ery, January 1921. 



brought about the revolution it did, had done much to 

 improve the conditions in these institutions. He 

 suggested rebuilding, cleansing, and segregation, and 

 his plans would have done much to arrest the appalling 

 mortality prevalent in the hospitals of those days, had 

 Lister's antiseptic surgery not come in just as his 

 efforts were about to bear fruit. Though Simpson had 

 been tempted to desert Edinburgh for St. Bartholo- 

 mew's Hospital in London, he remained faithful to 

 the city of his choice until death. A grave in West- 

 minster Abbey was offered, though the offer was 

 declined by his familj" as he had himself chosen his last 

 resting-place on the hills surrounding his beloved city. 



Note. — Sir James Young Simpson and Chloroform, by H. 

 Laing Gordon, in the Masters of Medicine (Fisher Unwin, 1897), 

 is recommended for a short, concise account of this great 

 physician's life. 



The Psychology of 

 Religious Experience 



By Robert H. Thouless, M.A. 



Corpus Christi College, Cambridge 



We do not give a sufficient account of religion by 

 describing it simply as a particular mode of behaviour, 

 or as a system of beliefs, or as a particular system of 

 emotions. It is all of these things. It includes a 

 peculiar kind of behaviour, of which worship is the 

 principal part. It has a system of beliefs which are 

 the necessary accompaniment of this behaviour ; 

 worship is impossible without a belief in a Being or 

 beings to whom that worship is offered. It is, however, 

 with the emotions accompanying rehgious behaviour 

 that this article is concerned. These are usually given 

 the name of " religious experience." 



It is probable that all persons feel religious experi- 

 ence at some time in their lives, though it is only in 

 the religious mystics that it plays a dominant part in 

 the shaping of their conduct. The sense of peace after 

 prayer or sacrament, or of exalted emotion after a 

 stirring sermon, are examples of religious experience. 

 Other examples may be found in the feeling of the 

 presence of God as described by Brother Laurence in 

 his book on The Practice 0/ the Presence oj God, or even 

 in the vague feeling of an intimate presence in nature — 

 such as that given by Thoreau in the . chapter on 

 Solitude of his Walden. 



Certain religious practices have as their aim the 

 intensification of the emotional experiences of religion. 

 This is avowedly the object of the " contempla- 

 tions " and " colloquys " of the Spiritual E.xercises of 



