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(3 reviews)
Author: Linda Stratmann
ISBN : 0750930993
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Format: PDF, EPUB
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Right up until the 19th century, physicians and philosophers regarded sleep as a state of near-oblivion in which there was no mental activity, a kind of halfway stage between wakefulness and death. For the Victorians, therefore, when anaesthesia was first practised, it was commonly seen as traumatic—for doctors were being asked to induce a condition looked upon as partial death. Viewed with suspicion, many feared that they would never wake again, or that they would lose their faculties on a permanent basis, even become insane. Yet, especially after Queen Victoria allowed its administration to her during childbirth, its use to block out pain became widespread. This engaging and entertaining book traces the social, medical and criminal history of chloroform, from early medical practices to create oblivion through the discovery of chloroform and its discovery, its use and misuse in the 19th century, to the present. Today chloroform is no longer used as an anaesthetic, but has a multitude of uses in industry and medical research, including a role in DNA profiling. A by-product of the chlorination of water, we inhale infinitesimal amounts of chloroform every time we have a shower.
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- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: The History Press (April 25, 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0750930993
- ISBN-13: 978-0750930994
- Product Dimensions: 5 x 7.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
Free Download Chloroform: The Quest for Oblivion
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.
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.