Chloroform, the Best of Anaesthetics

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Surgeons in all parts of the world have been much exercised of late over this most important subject, and a question of greater interest to suffering humanity it would be difficult to frame. For the past forty years anaesthetics have been in use, and millions who have been operated upon under their benign influences attest the inestimable value of this greatest of modern discoveries. Ether, although the first introduced, had made but little headway when Simpson, in 1847, gave chloroform to the world. It met with immediate acceptance from professional men, and within a very few years there was scarcely a surgeon of note in either hemisphere who had not used it, and extolled it in the strongest expressions of his mother tongue.

From its universal adoption, the inhalation of chloroform became the precursor of every serious operation, those who enjoyed with it quiet sleep, and who without it would have experienced intense suffering, were soon numbered by hundreds of thousands. Ever-recurring wars, with thousands of wounded, gave surgeons an opportunity of using chloroform on a very large scale, which only added to the well-deserved reputation which it seemed to have enjoyed from its very introduction.

There was but one single alloy in this general jubilee. Now and then some patient would die when chloroform had been inhaled. In former times such fatal accidents on the operating table were common enough to every surgeon of large experience, but now, since the introduction of chloroform, there was an uncomfortable suspicion that in some way the inhalation was to be blamed for these fatalities, for under its life-saving influences nobody ought to die. With this impression once excited, each accident, as reported and copied from journal to journal and from newspaper to newspaper, frightened the public, and slowly undermined the confidence which surgeons had previously had in this anaesthetic.