Francis Brodie Imlach

As a friend of James Young Simpson, Francis Imlach was intimately associated with the introduction of chloroform into clinical practice and was the first to extract a tooth under chloroform anaesthesia. Along with John Smith (q.v.) and Robert Nasmyth, he founded the Edinburgh Dental Dispensary, the predecessor of the Edinburgh Dental Hospital and School. He was the first surgeon with an exclusively dental practice to be elected President of a surgical College.

Francis Brodie Imlach, the son of an Edinburgh solicitor, educated at the High School in Edinburgh, became a licentiate of the College in 1841 and a Fellow in 1856.

Training in dental surgery at that time was less formal in the years before the first Dental Act in 1878 . Imlach learned his dentistry in Edinburgh and Paris and he went on to establish a large dental practice.

He was an influential medical politician credited, along with his friends John Smith and Robert Nasmyth with the founding in 1860 of the Edinburgh Dental Dispensary in Drummond Street, close to the College. This was to evolve into the Edinburgh Dental Hospital and School.

His lifelong friendship with James Young Simpson meant that he was involved in the introduction of chloroform into clinical practice from the very beginning. Within days of Simpson’s initial experiment on 4 November 1847, Imlach had extracted a tooth under chloroform anaesthesia and is given the credit for being the first practitioner to do so.

He was elected President of the College in 1879.

After retiral from active practice he supported and promoted what were then charitable institutions associated with medicine. He supported, in this way, Donaldson’s Hospital for the Deaf, the Orphan Hospital and the Morningside Asylum. Outwith medicine he was President of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts and a member of the Royal Company of Archers.