| Books: Chloroform
Essex Murders
Whiteley's Folly
Gloucestershire Murders
Crooks Who
Conned Millions
Notorious Blasted Rascal |
Chloroform: the quest for oblivion
Published 31 August 2003 (Sutton
Publishing Ltd)
This book may
be ordered from AmazonUK
It is
also available from Amazon USA and Amazon Canada
A history of the discovery, uses and abuses of chloroform from 1831 to the present.
Chloroform revolutionised surgery, but also caused hundreds of sudden deaths, the cause of
which was a hotly-debated mystery in which physicians took sides and hurled insults at
each other in the medical press. Opposition to
its use in childbirth was stilled when Queen Victoria used it in her last two
confinements. In warfare, there was an initial prejudice against using chloroform, but it
soon proved to be invaluable on the battlefield.
Chloroform was not just an anaesthetic. Taken internally or as a local
application it was used to relieve a wide variety of conditions, from cholera to gonorrhoea, though some of the
treatments may have been worse than the complaint. It is not surprising that criminals
attempted to use it, often unsuccessfully, or that people made dubious claims to have been
chloroformed when robbed under unsavoury circumstances. Women who said they had been
sexually assaulted when chloroformed by doctors or dentists were usually branded as
hysterical or delusional. Chloroform had a starring role in several sensational trials,
and dramatic suicides, while sheer carelessness led to many tragic accidents. In the
twentieth century chloroform was gradually superseded by new anaesthetics, but it has an
important role in modern medicine, where one of its many uses is to prepare samples for
DNA testing.
Some illustrations that didn't make it into the book are below.
 |
| Above is the original Junker's inhaler. The operator pumped the hand-bellows, driving
air through the chloroform in the revervoir. The second tube carried the mixture of air
and chloroform to the patient. This was a very popular apparatus of the late 19th century
but it had two drawbacks. The tubes looked very similar and if connected the wrong way the
result would be to pump liquid chloroform into the patient. This actually happened on more
than one occasion. If the apparatus was tilted a similar thing happened. Below is an
ingenious modification by Frederic Hewitt, where one tube is enclosed in the other. |
 |
© Linda Stratmann 2003 |
