Simpson, The Turbulent Life of a Medical Pioneer by Morrice McCrae

In 1847, challenging the firmly held convictions of the medical profession of the time, James Young Simpson demonstrated for the first time that a woman could be safely relieved of the pains of difficult and traumatic labour by the administration of a general anaesthetic. The book also gives a history of a time of rapid change in Scottish society that allowed the seventh son of a village baker in a rural part of Scotland to go to university and then become a successful physician, a medical professor at one of the leading university medical schools in the world and Physician to the Queen, all before he had reached the age of forty.