13 Facts About William Flockhart

William Flockhart did not practise as a surgeon, but with Duncan, worked closely with other doctors in Edinburgh on experimental drugs, which they then refined to improve in purity, following the medical experiments' results.

In December 1861, William Flockhart was elected to the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce.

Duncan and William Flockhart had premises at 52 North Bridge, Edinburgh which has a plaque to the pharmacists, dedicated in 1981, by the International Association for the Study of Pain.

The retail pharmacy business under William Flockhart's management flourished and another branch at 139 Princes Street, Edinburgh opened in 1846.

From 1855 to 1865, William Flockhart managed the business and it moved to 6 North Bridge.

When Duncan died, William Flockhart continued to partner with his son Doctor James Duncan, and the firm extended rapidly and grew its business on the back of the growing demand for chloroform and other drugs or analgesics.

William Flockhart died at Annacroich, after sudden onset of severe stomach pains, although medical colleagues came from Edinburgh to his aid, in August 1871, aged 62, and was buried at Warriston Cemetery, Edinburgh, near to where James Young Simpson is buried.

The chemist company that Duncan and William Flockhart had begun continued to operate in various forms in North Bridge, Edinburgh up until 1976, and later merged into large international pharma companies.

That William Flockhart supplied Simpson's self-experiment on 4 November 1847, was not the original plan, but his method for ensuring the chemical's purity was still broadly being used in the 1960s.

The circumstances and different opinions on how William Flockhart came to supply the surgeon with this drug is discussed in the Pharmaceutical Historian including statements by Simpson's daughter that William Flockhart and his partner worked until 2 am to prepare the first perchloride of formyle for her father's trial.

William Flockhart's product was exhibited in the London 1851 Exhibition, and that year Simpson paid William Flockhart to supply it to Florence Nightingale.

At the 1947 centenary of the chloroform use experiment, the company's contribution and William Flockhart's role was noted in the press.

Three of their children died in infancy, but their first son William Flockhart born 1861 and daughter Jane Edith outlived their parents.