Syme, JAMES, surgeon, was born, the son of a Fife lawyer, in Edinburgh, 7th November 1799, and received a thorough education in arts and medicine in the university of that city. Liston appointed him anatomical demonstrator. In 1818 he announced in Annals of Philosophy a method of making waterproof cloth by means of caoutchouc dissolved in coal-tar naphtha—a process for which a patent was taken out by Macintosh of Glasgow. From 1823 to 1832 he lectured on surgery, and, when refused a surgical appointment in the Edinburgh Infirmary, he established Minto House Hospital at his own expense, where he delivered a clinical course from 1829 to 1833. In 1831 appeared his well-known treatise on The Excision of Diseased Joints; and in 1832 his Principles of Surgery, which went through many editions, and which established his reputation as a teacher of the first rank. In 1833 he was elected to the chair of Clinical Surgery in the university, and in 1838 he was appointed surgeon in ordinary to the Queen in Scotland. In 1848 he gave up his Edinburgh chair to fill that vacated in London by the death of Liston; but collegiate misunderstandings induced him, after five months, to return to Edinburgh, where he was reappointed to his old chair. His life abounded in controversies. As an operator Syme had no superior; as a teacher he had no equal.
His innovations in the practice of his art were characterised by so much ingenuity, controlled by such scientific caution, that they were everywhere adopted. One of the best known of his pupils, Dr John Brown, terms him (Horæ Subsecivæ, i.) the 'best and ablest and most beneficent of men,' and the greatest surgeon Scotland ever produced. He further calls his spoken or written style 'the perfection of terse clearness.' Syme was a contributor to the Monthly Medical Journal, and was also the author of treatises on Diseases of the Rectum, on the Pathology and Practice of Surgery (1848), on Stricture of the Urethra and Fistula in Perineo (1849), on Incised Wounds, &c. He died June 26, 1870. See the Memoir by Dr Paterson (1874).