Parlor Games
A doff of the scrub cap — and a grinding of the pharmacologist’s pestle — for drug-making-and-taking pioneer Sir James Simpson, 1st Baronet, born on this day June 7, 1811 in Bathgate, West Lothian. The youngest of seven, James Simpson was a boy genius who entered university at just 14, receiving his medical degree at age 21. He would become the Chair of Medicine and Midwifery at the University of Edinburgh, but ‘twas his unconventional methodology in the “health sciences” that garnered his infamy. Indeed, Simpson’s intellectual gatherings at the family dwelling on Queen Street — conducted whilst his missus and children were safely out of eye and earshot in the country home in Avonbridge — were known for their bawdy improperness. The naughty Scottish doctor and his free-thinking — which is to say, drug-ingesting — physician mates surely put the “sin” in medicine, experimenting with the anesthetizing, which is to say stuporific, effects of chemicals while pounding blindly on the piano keys in the parlor. As I Understand It™, one evening in November of 1847, they unleashed a previously unknown narcotic called “chloroform,” which upon inhaling sent them into fits of elation, followed quickly by unconsciousness. Indeed, one scandalous female attendee was said to have exclaimed, "I'm an angel" upon inhalation, before collapsing in a euphoric heap. When Simpson awoke the next morning, nude and woozy — along with his thick-tongued science associates and their shamed, unbodiced companions — he realized that his willingness to push the limits of debauchery and delirium had resulted in a breakthrough in medical anethesia. As for Yours Truly Dooley™, my first exposure to the numbing effects of chloroform were in the television procedurals of the 1970's — "Mannix," "Police Woman Pepper Rodgers," and especially, "Mission Impossible" — staring Barbara Baines in the role of Cinnamon Carter, alongside IMF stalwarts Peter Lupus, Peter Graves and Peter Greg Morris — where criminals were always knocking out their victims with chloroform-soaked rags. My academy mates and I were fascinated by this miracle “juice” — as was later a distant relation of the good doctor Simpson — American football hero Orenthal James Simpson, who became somewhat of a back room health scientist himself, experimenting with all manner of mind-bending “Juice.” His work with amphetamine, methamphetamine, cocaine and heroine speedballs found him gleefully leaping through airports, making a bloody fool of himself onscreen and, alas, strangulating and stabbing his ex-wife and maître d boyfriend to bloody death. ‘Twas surely not behavior his cousin, the parlor room party boy, had in mind when he discovered the medicinal properties of chloroform, but ‘twas collateral damage in the quest for higher consciousness, one supposes.
