The Chloroform Baronet (Part 2)

of the medical community. He invited colleagues into his own home for a demonstration where a dentist used chloroform for a tooth extraction in front of an audience of scientific observers. One of the observers was a surgeon in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, and he was so so impressed by the painless tooth extraction that Simpson managed to convince him to try using chloroform in surgery. Two days later, with Simpson overseeing, that surgeon used chloroform to amputate a diseased forearm on

a five year old boy. After the operation, the surgeon recalled that the patient quote was found in bed like a child newly awakened from a refreshing sleep, with a clear, merry eye and placid expression of countenance, wholly unlike what is found to obtain after ordinary etherization end quote. Within a week, Simpson had successfully tested chloroform on thirty patients, and, in a frenzy, wrote a paper for publication in The Lancet.

He wrote about the chemical with flowery enthusiasm, saying that it had quote an agreeable, fragrant, fruit like odor and a second pleasant taste. This might seem over the top and more pertinently premature, given that the chemical had only been in use for about a week, and a good number of those that had tried it had taken it recreationally in Simpson's dining room, but it was clear even by that point that chloroform had distinct advantages, especially when

compared with ether. Chloroform was cheaper and more portable than ether, and easier to use. Physicians could hold up a handkerchief to their patient's faces rather than using a cumbersome, imposing inhaler. Chloroform didn't have a noxious smell that irritated the throat, Physicians needed far less of it to sedate their patients, and it worked much more quickly and reliably than ether.

Simpson was so confident about the efficacy of chloroform that he wrote a pamphlet promoting the chemical intended for general audiences, titled on a New Anesthetic Agent More Efficient than Sulfuric Ether. By the end of the month, that pamphlet had sold fifteen hundred copies. On December fifteenth, Edinburgh Hospital convened a meeting that unanimously concluded that they should use chloroform instead of ether in all operations at the hospital moving forward.

One committee participant recalled there was no instance on record where the discovery of a remedy had been so rapidly made known and its employment so universally adopted as that of the inhalation of chloroform. Before the end of eighteen forty seven, established man manufacturers were unable to keep up with demand, and new firms were springing up to cash in on the rush. But not every doctor was as

enthusiastic about chloroform as Simpson. There was a dark fear around chloroform for both philosophical and medical reasons, and Simpson would need to navigate those fears when faced with his most important patient yet, a woman who certainly knew her way around childbirth. Queen Victoria, I'm Danish forts and this is noble blood. One strain of criticism against chloroform arose from broader concerns about whether pain had any biological purpose.

At the time, it was common medical practice that the physician should not interfere with the body's natural process and should instead leave the body alone to heal itself. Because pain was considered a natural function, many doctors thought that suppressing it with anesthesia might cause more harm to the patient. Simpson had no patience for that argument. He rebutted that pain was unnecessary and destructive. In an early paper, he quoted the second century Greek physician Galen quote pain is

useless to the pained. He also had statistics to back it up. He found that the mortality rate associated with amputation of the thigh decreased from fifty percent to twenty five percent when the patients were anesthetized, suggesting that taking away patient's pain improved their healing rather than inhibiting it. This line of reasoning, buttressed by data, convinced some doctors that chloroform was safe to use in surgery. After all,

surgery is an inherently invasive, unnatural process. The body cannot naturally amputate a limb or biopsy by itself, and even though early anesthetics were unreliable, opiates and other forms of pain reduction have been used in surgery for centuries without much controversy, But many physicians balked at Simpson's use of chloroform during routine childbirth. Unlike surgery, childbirth is a process

that the body can undergo without medical intervention. Doctors and midwives alike thought that they should facilitate so called natural labor without getting in the way. A common adage was quote, A meddlesome midwifery is bad because to meddle in any of the natural functions of labor, including or relieving pain, might cause things to go wrong. But disbelief in the importance of labor pain was just as moral as it was medical. Victorian women were expected to show their femininity

by suffering for the greater good. Popular women's conduct manuals from the eighteen forties, like the Women of England and the Wives of England by Sarah Stickney Ellis, argued that women's moral authority came from being patient self sacrificing and disciplined. Childbirth was considered the ultimate display of virtue, as being able to suffer through pain for the good of a

child was the ultimate symbol of sacrifice. It also had biblical precedence, with the quote in sorrow, thou shalt bring forth children from Genesis three sixteen, quote, proving that pain during childbirth was a part of God's higher purpose. Even though doctors rarely brought out their Bibles to justify labor pain, many physicians critical of chloroform used religious language to talk

about the medical utility of women's physical suffering. As one physician put it at the time, quote, the agonies of delivery were an indicator of safety and a well nigh holy accompaniment of childbirth. Another doctor wrote that it was ultimately more ethical to convince their patients to endure labor pain because relieving it would deny their biological destiny, as

quote Daughters of Eve. An obstetrician from Liverpool suggested that women who wanted chloroform or childbirth were shirking their natural duty and thus were so ethically dubious that they were quote in no fit state to make decisions and thus should be ignored. Quote, are we going to allow the patient to tell us what to do? He wrote. Most of these early and influential critics of chloroform did not

only have ethical concerns. They also worried about chloroform's safety, since this was an experimental drug that had gone from a niche chemical solvent to a pretty popular anesthetic in a little over a month. These critics were also suspicious of how Simpson advertised chloroform directly to the public before it had been properly tested. One physician wrote quote, I did not expect that doctor Simpson would have appealed so generally and through so many channels to the feelings and

imperfect knowledge of society in general. For it is, i am happy to say, still very uncommon in our profession to find those of its members who would give tone to its bearing and conduct. Professors, for instance, of our ancient universities going about from one city to another to announce and exhibit the wonder effects of new gas, and, as I am informed, somewhat after the fashion of a showman, to demonstrate them personally at dinner parties and in drawing rooms.

Simpson replied personally, writing quote, my blood feels chilled by the cruel inhumanity and deliberate cruelty which you and some members of the profession openly avow you have not yet had time to get rid of some old professional caprices and nonsensical thought. Simpson invited that physician to stay with him, perhaps to try out chloroform himself, but the physician declined.

That doctor did have a point, though throughout eighteen forty seven, Simpson was still riding the high of his discovery, both metaphorically and literally. He hawked chloroform to anyone who would listen, and pushed the drug on unwitting dinner guests. While his sister in law was a bit cautious after her first experiment with it on November fourth, Simpson used to joke that he would chloroform her, and he chased her around

the house with a bottle, laughing. Once, Simpson made a cocktail with chloric ether and aer rated water, which he called chlor reform champagne, and served it to a dinner party. They found it nice but quote hetty. The butler offered some to the cook, who downed it and immediately collapsed. The butler ran upstairs announced that he had poisoned the cook, and the guests rushed to the kitchen to find the cook on the floor snoring loudly. The incident was not fatal,

but it did disturb Simpson's guests. Simpson, however, was completely undeterred, as one widow of an Edinburgh physician later recalled the professor used to try his experiments with chloroform on us girls. He was then just introducing it, and with some of the liquid simply poured onto a handkerchief, would have half a dozen of us lying about in various stages of sleep. Our mother feared nothing and was only too delighted to sacrifice,

if unavoidably, a daughter or two to science. Chloroform's critics listed their reasonable practical objections alongside more philosophical ones about the nature of pain and the feminine virtue of suffering.

This rhetorical strategy majorly backfired. Simpson couldn't effectively undermine his critics concerns about the safety of chloroform because it was still so early, so no one had the data to prove anything substantial either way, and so he went after his critics' moral arguments instead, which were on more shaky ground. Simpson was willing to fight directly with his critics in pamphlets, articles,

and published letters directly responding to their points. In December eighteen forty seven, and Simpson published a pamphlet entitled Answers to the Religious Objections Advanced against the Employment of anesthetic agents in midwafery and surgery and Obstetrics. In the pamphlet, Simpson wrote that the traditional interpretations of the Biblical quote in sorrow, thou shalt bring forth children did not mean that women were to experience pain, but that they were

to work during childbirth. He dismissed the moral arguments about a woman's inherent predisposition towards suffering as quote aught else than indications of a strange degree of eccentricity of thought. He dismissed any objection to the use of chloroform as prejudice, but soon chloroform's dangers would be impossible to ignore. In New ca Casle, on January twenty eighth, eighteen forty eight, a surgeon showed up at the home of a fifteen year old girl named Hannah Greener for a routine procedure.

She had an infected ingrown toenail, and the surgeon had arrived to remove it. While it was a minor surgery, the nail bed can be surprisingly painful, so the surgeon put a teaspoon of chloroform onto a cloth and held it toward her nose. She took two breaths before pulling the cloth away, but the doctor told her to keep going. After the first incision, Hannah flailed until the doctor gave

her more chloroform. When the doctor pulled up an eyelid to check if she was anesthetized, her eye stayed open. She turned pale and didn't respond when the surgeon splashed water on her face. Two minutes after the surgeon administered chloroform, she was dead. An autopsy revealed that quote, congestion of the lungs after inhaling chloroform had caused Hannah's death, but

did not blame the surgeon. The coroner wrote, quote, no human foresight, no human knowledge, no degree of science could have forewarned any man against the use of chloroform in this case. After a report about Hannah's death appeared in The Lancet, news spread quickly about the case. It was tragic but commonplace for patients to die after surgery from

infection or blood loss. But it was nearly unheard of for a patient to die while surgery had barely begun, let alone a young and healthy patient dying during a minor operation. Headlines like death by chloroform appeared in newspapers across England, but the medical establishment could not reach consensus on what exactly had killed her. It was still unclear how exactly chloroform worked, so no one knew how it

had suffocated her. To chloroform skeptics, the episode proved that the drug was dangerous and had been adopted too quickly, but chloroform supporters thought that these results were inconclusive, and that perhaps she died not because chloroform was inherently dangerous, but instead because she had been given too much of it or it was administered improperly. Some even thought that Hannah's death had nothing to do with chloroform at all, and that she instead died because of the shock of

the surgical operation. One physician was unconvinced by all of these hypotheses. John Snow, a surgeon from London. Like Simpson, Snow was interested in the burgeoning field of anesthesiology, but temperamentally these two men could not have been more different. Snow was known for being methodical and reserved. He didn't drink, eat meat, read novels, or consume any water that hadn't

been distilled. Unlike Simpson, Snow was a research scientist. He had published a paper about how to properly administer ether in eighteen forty seven and had been conducting animal studies on chloroform throughout the rest of the year to compare fatal and non fatal doses. According to historian Linda Stratman, quote, he was the personification of order, keeping a diary of every case in which he administered an anesthetic and detailed

notes of his excs. Spearman's end, his familiarity with anesthesia meant that he found the most common explanation that the chloroform had suffocated Hannah improbable. Usually deaths from asphyxiation were slow and involved a lot of visible struggle, but Hannah had rapidly collapsed, indicating to him that something else was going on. Snow studied the inquest, testimony, and medical reports

and found that Hannah had not been suffocated. Instead, she had overdosed from having been given too much chloroform too quickly. Even though Hannah had only been given one teaspoonful of chloroform, it was undiluted, so it was in its strongest form. Snow emphasized that this made it dangerously easy for a patient to overdose. He also found that the surgeon's method, holding a handkerchief dipped in chloroform up to Hannah's nose and mouth was too imprecise. There was no way to

control exactly how much chloroform Hannah was getting. Even small factors like the temperature and air circulation in the room, or how close the handkerchief was to the patient's face, could change how the drug worked. Worse, from his animal studies, Snow had found that chloroform vapor continued to accumulate in the lungs even after it had already been administered, making it even more difficult to control. Luckily, Snow had a solution,

an inhaler. Snow even had developed a prototype a large metal can connected to a gas mask with a hose. With this kind of a device, Snow could mix the chloroform with air and introduced the drug gradually to make sure patients weren't getting too much too quickly. These findings should have comforted Simpson, since they suggested that chloroform wasn't inherently dangerous, but it was so powerful that it just had to be administered carefully. This wasn't so different from

the arguments Simpson was making himself at the time. He had maintained that, just like familiar anesthetics like opiates or ether, chloroform wasn't risk free but safe in moderation. And yet Simpson was up in arms about Snow's result. Simpson thought that Hannah's death had nothing at all to do with chloroform. Instead, he fixated on another detail. The surgeon had given Hannah

some brandy in addition to the chloroform. This was relatively common practice at the time to calm nervous patients, but Simpson thought that Hannah Greener had drowned from having brandy poured into her mouth while she was unconscious. But this hypothesis did not make any sense. The surgeon gave her brandy before she was given the chloroform, and the autopsy showed no signs of drowning. Still, Simpson wasn't the only one who disagreed with Snow's findings. Physicians published scathing letters

in The Lancet and the London Medical Gazette. Arguing that Snow was overcomplicating this whole anesthesia business. They thought that all a surgeon had to do to safely use chloroform was watch the patient and stop when they fell unconscious. It was still unclear whether the chloroform had killed Hannah through the heart or the lungs, or whether the chloroform affected some undiagnosed pre existing condition that reared its head for the first time during the surgery. Ever, the methodical

researcher Snow reluctantly agreed with those conclusions. These findings could not be the final word on the safety of chloroform. His sample size was too small. Hannah was just one case. Snow would have to wait for more deaths before he could make a definite conclusion. Unfortunately, he did not have to wait long. Within months, reports appeared from across Europe and North America of patients dying in surgery after taking chloroform.

By the early eighteen fifties, Hannah Greener's death no longer seemed like a freak accident. Snow put out a paper in eighteen fifty two comparing twenty one documented chloroform deaths. He advanced essentially the same argument as the greener case that these deaths were a result of the surgeons using handkerchiefs to administer the drug and ending up giving patients too much chloroform too quickly. Still, Snow's paper did not

make that big of a splash. The medical establishment was still fighting tooth and nail about every aspect of chloroform, whether you needed to measure how much of the drug you used, whether it was safer than ether, whether pain relief should be used in surgery at all. But one very important person did take note of Snow's new paper, Queen Victoria. Even though Queen Victoria had nine children, hated

pregnancy and childbirth, which she called wretched. During her sixth pregnancy in eighteen forty seven, the Duchess of Sutherland sent Victoria a pamphlet about the obstetric potential of chloroform. In eighteen fifty, when she was pregnant with Prince Arthur, she sent her Royal accoutier to meet with John Snow about potentially using the drug in her own labor, but in the end she was too cautious to go through with it.

By the time she was pregnant again in eighteen fifty three, she had Snow administer chloroform to one of her ladies in waiting during a tooth extraction. After seeing proof that he had administered the drug safely and successfully, Victoria invited Snow to court for an interview. Snow put on a court suit with a sword and flattened head, and met up with Prince Albert, victorious husband and the cause of

all of these painful pregnancies. On the way there, Snow ran into a friend's wife and child on the street. He recalled that the child threw up her hands and exclaimed, Oh, isn't doctor Snow pretty, Mamma. Snow was short, balding, and self professed to be plain, so he repeated this story as a self deprecating anecdote for the rest of his life. Upon meeting Prince Albert, Snow and the consort talked through

the queen's concerns. Snow was impressed by the Prince's interest in the sciences, and Albert was comforted by Snow's caution, expertise, and humility. Then and there, Albert approved Snow to administer chloroform to the queen for the birth of her eighth child. On April seventh, eighteen fifty three, at twelve forty p m. According to Snow's detailed notes, Snow arrived at the Queen's bedside. She had been in the labor for a few hours, but wanted to relieve her pain for the final stages,

and really, who can blame her? Ironically, given how much he railed against the use of handkerchiefs in anesthesia, Snow gave Victoria a chloroform dipped handkerchief to relieve her pain. But Snow figured it was safe to use a handkerchief because he was only using a tiny bit of chloroform. He had noted that women in labor often required a smaller dose of anesthetic, and he aimed to anesthetize his patients so lightly that most of them remained conscious and

responded to commands without remembering the labor pain. He used the same method to relieve Victoria's pain, and it worked between contractions. Snow reported that quote there was complete ease. At one thirteen in the afternoon, Leopold was born. Victoria was reported to have said that the experience of using chloroform was quote soothing, quieting, and delightful beyond measure. The next day she wrote to her uncle, I can report most favorably of it myself, for I have never been

better or stronger. Since the use of chloroform was still controversial, Buckingham Palace tried to keep it under wraps, but eventually news got out. Snow's patience begged him for details about the royal birth, but all he would say was that Her Majesty is a model patient. One of his patients refused to take any more chloroform until Snow told her what the Queen had said while she was under the influence.

Snow said quote, her Majesty asked no questions until she had breathed very much longer than you have, and if you will only go in loyal imitation, I will tell you everything. The patient complied, and then when she woke up, doctor Snow was already gone. Simpson too was elated about the successful royal birth. It illustrated chloroform's safety and efficacy more than any of his letters or pamphlets ever could have. If chloroform was good enough for the Queen, it was

good enough for the public. Simpson still took every opportunity he could to promote the drug, and he would eventually become one of the most renowned physicians in Britain. He was awarded a baronetcy in eighteen sixty six. When Sir J James Young Simpson died in eighteen seventy, more than thirty thousand people filled the streets of Edinburgh for his funeral. According to newspaper reports, Queen Victoria sent a personal message

of sympathy to the family. Simpson's lectures to medical students at the University of Edinburgh compared chloroform to innovations like eyeglasses or coffee, which were initially dismissed by the church as offsprings of man's wicked mind, but eventually were accepted into daily life. But Simpson ended up getting that wrong. Concerns about chloroform's safety never went away. After physicians collected decades of statistics about how many patients died under the

influence of chloroform, it developed a bad reputation. By the late nineteenth century. Chloroform also became a popular plot device in crime fiction, appearing in lurid tales of criminals incapacitating their victims with nothing but a handkerchief. As early twentieth century, doctors turned to alternative anesthetics like nitrous oxide and eventually intravenous options, chloroform fell out of medical use almost entirely.

James Simpson's most important contribution to medical science wasn't actually chloroform itself. Instead, as one contemporary wrote after his death, quote Simpson adopted obstetrics when it was the lowest and most ignoble of our medical arts. He has left it a science, numbering among its professors many of the most distinguished of our modern physicians. He made childbirth something to

be taken seriously. There is no doubt that Simpson way over soled the benefits of chloroform and downplayed its dangers. His science was dubious. Throughout his life, Simpson often repeated the frankly ludicrous claim that no one had ever died from chloroform. But his dogged insistence that patience, particularly women giving birth, didn't need to undergo so much pain, has

stood the test of time. As historian Donald Cayton put it, It's hard to say how much longer women would have had to wait for anesthesia had it not been for Simpson's advocacy. That's the story of James Simpson. But stick around to hear about how John snow not only administered chloroform to the Queen, but also so helped solve one of the deadliest collar outbreaks in London's history. A year after John Snow gave chloroform to Queen Victoria, in eighteen

fifty three, an outbreak of cholera tore through London. Tens of thousands of people died throughout the city. Most thought that the disease spread through the air, but John Snow

had another hypothesis. Cholera was in the water. Snow had first developed that theory during a previous collar outbreak in eighteen forty nine, when he noticed that more people were dying of cholera that got their water from two specific companies in South London and so in eighteen fifty four, he started analyzing colera deaths in a similar way to

those that died of chloroform, looking for patterns. After marking out the cases on a map of the city, he noticed that deaths were concentrated around a pump at Broadwick Street, where townspeople came to collect water for drinking, cooking, and cleaning. Snow published his results and convinced the city to take away the pump handle Soon the collar outbreak went away. Later, the authorities discovered that the pump had been contaminated by

a leaky sewer, confirming Snow's theory. Today, there is a replica of the pump on Broadwick Street without a handle, named after John Snow to commemorate his essential discovery. Noble Blood is a production of iHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is hosted by me Dana Schwartz. Writers for Noble Blood are Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick,

Paul Jaffey, Natasha Laski, and me Dana Swartz. The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk and Nomes Griffin, with supervising producer rima il Kaali and executive producers Aaron Manke, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.