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Chloroform: The Quest for Oblivion

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This compact book is a spellbinding history of chloroform, from its discovery in 1831-2 to its present role in our industrial plants and our environment. It is, to my knowledge, the first and only historical survey of the famous anesthetic. The author has researched a prodigious number of sources, many of them little known. The book is written for laymen but physicians, especially anesthesiologists, will enjoy reading it and learn much from it.

The author clearly presents the controversies which surrounded chloroform from its birth on: who was its first discoverer; the debate between Boston & Edinburgh over its safety, as compared to that of ether; the medical and religious oppositions to its use in obstetrics (or even in surgery); the quarrel between the Scottish and English surgeons on its safe mode of administration; and the disputes over the mechanism of the instantaneous death that it not infrequently caused. All sides of the debates are fairly presented and soundly judged on the basis of facts gleaned in a vast literature.

The scientific and medical material is presented clearly and soberly, in a crisp, vivid, and lucid style. The author presents a fair judgment of a drug, which spared patients the horrors of the bite of the knife but could also kill with the speed of a thunderbolt.

The book also offers vivid biographic vignettes of the great pioneers of chloroform. Some of them, little known, such as Samuel Guthrie and Edward Lawrie beautifully come alive in the book.

Over the years chloroform was recommended for every physical and mental disease and the book includes many amusing stories about those medical fads. From its birth to our present days, chloroform was also used for wrongdoing & Mrs. Stratmann narrates at great length some famous criminal cases involving chloroform, which will delight every crime buff. No mystery writer could have presented with more verve and sense of suspense the stories of Adelaide Bartlett, W. Markand, Sir William Osler, WT Stead, HW Mudgett, and "Old Man" WM Rice.

Chloroform raised much clinical and scientific interest on the Continent, especially in Germany, though less so than in the UK. I hope that the author will delve more extensively with the story of chloroform in Continental Europe in her book's 2nd edition.

This work is a serious book on a difficult medical subject but its fluent, crisp and vivid style makes it a delight to read. I immensely enjoyed reading it and am sure that laymen & physicians who read it will share my pleasure. I highly recommend it to both.

Ray J. Defalque,MD,MS
Prof. (Ret.) UAB School of Medicine

Meticulously researched and skilfully written, this book is a fascinating history of the use of chloroform, both medically and in less laudable pursuits. Fascinating characters crowd the pages--Samuel Guthrie, who managed to survive his own explosive experiments and become the discoverer of the controversial substance; Adelaide Bartlett, whose acquittal on the charge of murdering her husband with chloroform prompted a judge's hope that she would now "tell us how she did it"; W.T. Stead, the crusading journalist who used chloroform in his attempt to expose the Victorian trade in young girls; Dr. John Snow, whose administration of chloroform to Queen Victoria prompted that supposedly staid lady to pronounce the effect "delightful beyond measure"; and, H.H. Holmes, who holds the dubious distinction as "America's first serial killer". The clarity of Ms. Stratmann's writing, and her touches of dry wit, ensure a painless journey through what could have been a soporific topic in less-deft hands. Students of Victorian crime will be especially interested in her new research and insights into the Bartlett case. I highly recommend this book and hope that we will see more from this writer.

According to Linda Stratmann, "Descriptions and illustrations of surgery in the seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries are mainly a catalogue of unrelieved agonies." It is hard to disagree with this assessment. Patients were restrained on the operating table by strong orderlies and leather straps and given a cloth to bite on to help keep them quiet. Surgeons may have been skillful; they used the sharpest of knives to cut off limbs, for instance, with astonishing speed. They could not control pain except by getting it over with as quickly as possible. When the anesthetic properties of ether were discovered, it was a great boon to humanity. But Stratmann's book, _Chloroform: The Quest for Oblivion_ (Sutton) details the history of the second great anesthetic. It is a dramatic rise and fall story, told with detail and a sense of broader social history.

Ether worked wonderfully well, but it had disadvantages, especially its explosiveness. James Young Simpson, an obstetrician in Edinburgh, discovered the effects of chloroform. There were no experimental standards in place, and Simpson's procedure sounds simple and dangerous: he would get samples of any substance with a "breatheable vapour, inhale them from a tumbler, and make notes of his reactions." He enlisted friends as guinea pigs as well. Four days after being knocked out by chloroform in 1847, he used it successfully on an obstetric case. Though there is a legend that ministers denounced chloroform because taking pain away from childbirth was irreligious, Stratmann has not found documentation that this is so, although Simpson did get private letters along those lines.

Despite the frivolous objections, chloroform did have its bad effects on some patients as all medicines do. There was a long and emotional argument over whether it affected the heart or the respiration after doctors finally realized that some people were dying from it. Chloroform continued to be used until newer, safer agents began to be used in the 1950s. This surprising book shows that it was not just used for anesthesia, but also for general sedation, to combat seasickness, and even as fuel for steamer boats. In addition, it was used for criminal activities like murder and robbery, but it was not very successful for these (or for many of the other proposed uses), even though they did make good lurid stories for the Victorian press. The wide range of _Chloroform_ makes it an amusing history not only of an important aspect of medical science but of the society of the time.