Medicine

"Challenging today from the past" with material from the arts, history and science in Scotland

August 16, 2026 by Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird in Light Magazine

As told in the delightful movie Mrs. Brown, Queen Victoria had a great love for the Scottish Balmoral Castle. The Queen actually preferred Scotland to England. As a result, everything Scottish suddenly became fashionable. Tartans, reels, bagpipes and sporrans were considered cultured and refined where before they had been hidden away when friends from England arrived.

Queen Victoria also had a preference for Scottish doctors, in particular Sir James Simpson of Edinburgh. Her appointment of James Simpson in 1847 as one of her Majesty’s Physicians was symptomatic of Victoria’s innovative leadership style. He was Professor of Midwifery at the University of Edinburgh. Despite the prejudice many have today to all things ‘Victorian’, Queen Victoria helped open the doors to modern science and medicine. Even as a child, she led the way as the first member of the Royal Family to be vaccinated for smallpox. Later as Victoria was to give birth in 1853 to her eighth child, Prince Leopold, she turned to Sir James Simpson, the father of modern anesthetics, for help.

By Jonathan Patrick in the Fall 2015 Issue: Health Beyond The Hospital

This article originally appeared on Septermber 1, 2015 in Comment,a publication of CARDUS: www.cardus.ca.

For better or ill, my academic meanderings have brought me to a career where I spend the majority of my time building mathematical models to aid health-care managers in solving complex scheduling and capacityplanning problems. In other words, I try to convince health-care managers, on the strength of my word, to adopt often counterintuitive policies based on complex mathematical models they cannot hope to understand—and that doing so will provide better care for those who need it. Think of it as bringing Walmart's supply-chain sophistication to the world of health care. But what makes my work most difficult is not solving equations, or even explaining them. Rather, those I seek to convince are largely driven by a utilitarian ethic that uses mathematics to justify ends that, in my mind, contradict the proper goals of medicine.