Chloroform eased Queen Victoria's labour and sparked a bitter fight over credit
In 1847 Edinburgh obstetrician James Young Simpson announced that chloroform could put patients under. A rival, Robert Mortimer Glover, had described its anaesthetic effects five years earlier and accused Simpson of stealing the discovery. Within a decade the sweet-smelling liquid was used at royal births, and its hidden dangers were claiming lives.
Chemists stumbled onto chloroform several times around 1831. A Frankfurt an der Oder pharmacist named Moldenhawer and the American physician Samuel Guthrie both made it from chlorinated lime and alcohol but mistook it for a different compound; Guthrie even noticed it numbed sensation. Justus von Liebig got its formula wrong. In 1834 the French chemist Jean-Baptiste Dumas worked out its composition and gave it the name that stuck.
Glover's 1842 thesis, tested on dogs, won a Harveian Society gold medal and called such compounds a new class of poisons. Simpson was one of the examiners for Glover's later doctoral thesis but claimed he never read it. On 4 November 1847 he and two colleagues, experimenting on themselves with various vapours, declared chloroform's power in humans. Glover wrote furious letters, and in 1848 Robert Halliday Gunning presented rabbit experiments that backed Glover and disputed Simpson's originality. The danger findings were largely ignored.
Popularity outran safety. In 1848 a 15-year-old, Hannah Greener, died while being anaesthetised to have an infected toenail removed, and fit patients died after inhaling it. John Snow designed an inhaler that year to control the dose and later gave chloroform to Queen Victoria during the births of Leopold and Beatrice. Joseph Thomas Clover improved the apparatus in 1862. By 1895 Britain was producing about 750,000 doses a week. Eventually its tendency to trigger fatal heart rhythm disturbances pushed doctors back to ether.
Today chloroform is an industrial workhorse rather than a medicine. It is made by heating methane or methyl chloride with chlorine, and its biggest use is conversion into a refrigerant gas that becomes the starting point for Teflon. A version in which deuterium replaces its hydrogen is a standard solvent for NMR spectroscopy. Nature makes it too: many seaweeds produce it, and soil fungi probably do. Mixing bleach with household alcohols or acetone can also generate some unintentionally.
Source: Chloroform
