Chlorite
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
Important: Safety Warning
This page describes the casual use of chloroform, ether, or similar anesthetics. These substances can kill by respiratory arrest with little warning and must never be used outside a medical setting.
In addition, this page presents medical treatment from an era before modern medicine. The remedies described are ineffective against the conditions named, and some of the ingredients or doses are harmful. Do not use them to treat any illness; consult a qualified medical professional.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
a mineral of a grassgreen color, opaque, usually friable or easily pulverized, composed of little spangles, scales, prisms, or shining small grains, and consisting of silica, alumina, magnesia, and protoxide of iron. It is closely allied in character to mica and talc. CHLOROFORM (CHCl3, trichloromethane), is formed by the action of the sun's rays on a mixture of chlorine and marsh gas; also by the action of caustic potash on chloral or chloracetic acid, or by the action of nascent hydrogen on tetrachloride of carbon. It is prepared on a large scale by distilling water and alcohol with bleaching powder. Chloroform is a colorless, mobile, heavy, ethereal liquid. Specific gravity, 1.5. It boils at 62°; its vapor density is four times that of air; it is nearly insoluble in water, but dissolves readily in alcohol. It has a sweet taste. It dissolves alkaloids, etc. fats, It should not be exposed to the light, as acid and it may decompose, hydrochloric chlorine being set free. Chloroform is used in medicine, dissolved in alcohol, under the name of chloric ether, as a stimulant. Chloroform taken internally acts as a narcotic, sedative, and antispasmodic, and is given in cases of asthma, colic, and cholera, also for neuralgia. Linimentum Chloroformi, equal parts of Chloroform and camphor liniment, is used externally to allay pain and irritation in neuralgia and itching. The vapor of Chloroform, when inhaled for some time, produces a temporary insensibility to pain. Inhaled in small doses it it produces pleasurable inebriation, followed by drowsiness; in larger doses it causes loss of voluntary motion, suspension of mental faculties, with slight contraction of the muscles and rigidity of the limbs; then if the inhalation is continued a complete relaxation of the voluntary muscles takes place, but if carried too far it causes dangerous symptoms of apnea or of syncope, and the patient must be restored by artificial respiration. Chloroform should not be administered to persons suffering from cerebral disease or organic cardiac affection. Dr. Simpson, of Edinburgh, in 1847, began to employ the vapor as a means of producing anesthesia or insensibility, partial or complete.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's 1921 description of chlorite as a grass-green, friable mineral of "silica, alumina, magnesia, and protoxide of iron" still holds, though chlorite is now treated not as one species but as a group of layered silicates with named members such as clinochlore and chamosite, and it gives its name to the chlorite zone of low-grade (greenschist) metamorphism used routinely by field geologists. The chloroform text that follows it has dated far more sharply. Simpson's 1847 anaesthetic was abandoned in the twentieth century because it caused sudden fatal heart-rhythm failure and liver damage, giving way to halothane in the 1950s and today to agents like sevoflurane; the internal doses recommended here for asthma, colic and cholera are simply dangerous, and the United States banned chloroform in drugs and cosmetics in 1976 after it was linked to cancer in animals.
Written for this edition, 2026.