Chloroform
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
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.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
a heavy, transparent, colorless liquid composed of carbon, hydrogen, and chlorine. It is prepared by distilling a mixture of water, alcohol, and bleaching powder, or chloride of lime. Chloroform must be kept in the dark or it will decompose; it must be corked tightly or it will evaporate. It is used in the arts to dissolve rubber, resins, and fats. In medicine, it is administered in minute quantities. Its effects are akin to those of alcohol, but are more energetic. In surgery, chloroform is used to produce unconsciousness during a painful operation. It was first used for this purpose by a Dr. Simpson of Edinburgh, 1848. It is administered by presenting a saturated sponge to the patient's nose. The vapor spreads through the lungs and blood to all parts of the body. In a few moments the patient passes through all stages of alcoholic excitement into a helpless, we may say drunken, sleep, during which he is unconscious of pain. The most painful operations may be performed without his knowledge--operations that otherwise could not be performed. Chloroform is an essential part of the army surgeon's outfit, and does much to save the lives of men wounded in battle. It should be administered only by an assistant of experience, as an overdose produces death. With proper precautions, however, its use is not dangerous. Only one person out of three or four thousand fails to come out from under the influence of chloroform. Ether is preferred by many surgeons. Keepers of dangerous wild animals, as lions or tigers, put them under the influence of chloroform when it is necessary to handle them, to dress wounds, or to transfer them from one cage to another. It may be administered by fastening a saturated sponge to the end of a pole and pushing it into the cage under the animal's nose. See Ether ; Surgery
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's confidence in 1910 that "with proper precautions its use is not dangerous" did not survive the century. Chloroform was abandoned as a surgical anaesthetic in Britain and North America because it damages the liver and can throw the heart into fatal ventricular fibrillation within seconds of the first breaths, sometimes in healthy young patients — the "sudden death" the entry glimpsed in its one-in-three-or-four-thousand figure. It was displaced by halothane from 1956 and then by isoflurane and sevoflurane, delivered by calibrated vaporiser rather than a saturated sponge; the United States banned chloroform from drugs and cosmetics in 1976, and it is now classed as a possible human carcinogen. Its main modern role is industrial, as a feedstock for refrigerant and fluoropolymer manufacture. One small correction: Simpson used it on patients in November 1847, not 1848.
Written for this edition, 2026.