Chloroform was first made by the French chemist Jean Baptiste Dumas by reacting acetic acid with chlorine, but its use as an anesthetic was pioneered by James Simpson, a Scottish physician. On November 4, 1847, Simpson and his friends were looking for some entertainment and experimented with inhaling various substances without success. Next they tried chloroform. After some initial hilarity, Simpson and friends passed out. His reaction when he woke up was “this is much stronger and better than ether”. Ether had been introduced the previous year when surgeon John Collins Warren removed a tumor from the throat of a patient anesthetized with ether at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Simpson capitalized on his chloroform adventure and just four days later successfully delivered a baby after chloroforming the mother. Within a month he had successfully used chloroform on more than fifty patients, one of whom is said to have been so pleased with its efficacy that he named the daughter he bore “Anesthesia.” It would be a great footnote to the story if it were true. Is not. The baby was named Wilhelmina. The process was not without danger, and in 1848 the first death attributed to chloroform was recorded. Hannah Green, a young girl died, probably due to improper administration of the anesthetic. This, together with the Calvinist Church of Scotland’s opposition to chloroform cast a shadow over its use. The Church opposed the use of any anesthetic during childbirth, on the grounds that God had punished all of Eve’s descendants by ensuring that women would give birth to children in pain. It seems that Eve’s decision to tempt Adam with this fruit of the tree of knowledge was not a good one. Opposition to the use of chloroform, however, evaporated when Queen Victoria agreed to be anesthetized for the birth of Prince Leopold. The Queen’s approval was as close as you could get to God’s approval, and the use of chloroform proliferated. It was soon even incorporated into various patent medicines such as ‘Hamlin’s Wizard Oil’ and ‘Chlorodyne’ as a ‘cure all’. This was not only useless but also dangerous. Ingestion of significant amounts of chloroform can cause liver damage. Today chloroform is no longer used as an anesthetic, but because it is a byproduct of water chlorination, we are exposed to it in small doses in our drinking water. Whether this presents a lifelong risk is debatable, but chloroform is easily removed using a household water filter. Bottled water is not treated with chlorine, so it does not contain any chloroform. @JoeSchwarcz
