How chloroform anesthesia reached Lowell, Massachusetts: From Simpson's pamphlet to Gladwin's advertisement.

J.Y. Simpson of Edinburgh, Scotland discovered chloroform anesthesia in November 1847. During this time, W.T.G. Morton's agents had been collecting royalties for the use of ether across much of the United States. After reading about the advantages of chloroform as cited in C.T. Jackson's writings in the Boston Daily Atlas, S.F. Gladwin, a dentist in Lowell, Massachusetts, who had been reluctant to pay any ether royalties, demonstrated his independence and opportunism in swiftly adopting chloroform in his practice and publicizing its use through local advertisements.

"To nitrous oxide, chloroform gives way": Was Dr. W.J.A. DeLancey's poetic license in advertising inspired?

Born in New Hampshire but raised in Massachusetts, 14-year-old William J.A. DeLancey became "the man of the house" after the accidental death of his father. Amiable and good humored, young DeLancey supported his widowed mother and his three sisters until the girls all reached maturity. After he married, DeLancey moved to Illinois and took up dentistry, eventually settling in Centralia. Following anesthesia training back east at Manhattan's Colton Dental Association, DeLancey returned to Centralia. There he practiced the Coltonian method of testing freshly made nitrous oxide upon himself before using the gas upon patients. Before his training at Colton Dental, DeLancey had advertised in Centralia newspapers only in prose. After he began administering laughing gas to his patients and to himself, DeLancey waxed poetic and began advertising in heroic couplets in local newspapers.

From ACE to ACENO: How America's Munson added Harley's British mixture to nitrous oxide.

An Ohio dentist, Corydon Munson, patented a gasometer with an attachment for vaporizing trace amounts of volatile general anesthetics or their mixtures into unoxygenated nitrous oxide. After vaporizing a variant of George Harley's ACE mixture into nitrous oxide, Munson branded his own novel anesthetic combination as ACENO.

Robert Alden Fales, the fifteen-year-old criminal chloroformist.

An ex-employee of a Newark straw hat factory, 15-year-old Robert Alden Fales battered the factory's cashier Thomas Haydon on the head multiple times with a wooden staff. Fales then applied a chloroform-soaked handkerchief to Haydon's nose until the cashier stopped moving. Arrested and convicted of murder, Fales had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. At 23 years of age, the criminal chloroformist died in jail from tuberculosis.

The New York Herald's Very First Report on Dr. Horace Well's Arrest and Suicide-An Original Article Found in New York City Public Library.

The accounts of Dr. Wells' personal life, particularly those of his tempestuous final days, have remained somewhat speculative. On January 24, 1848, a troubled Dr. Wells raced outside of his home and practice on Chambers Street and threw sulfuric acid (vitriol) on two alleged "loose" Broadway girls. We were able to find an original copy of an article published by the New York Herald in the New York City Public Library describing the events of Well's final days.

Anaesthetic or "Antiaesthetic" or "Antaesthetic"? Correspondence From Andrew Buchanan, MD, to James Simpson, MD, Concerning a Name for the Agents Producing Insensibility.

In November 1847, James Young Simpson, MD, of Edinburgh, Scotland, applied the word anaesthesia to the state of narcotism and insensibility produced by the inhaled vapors of sulfuric ether and chloroform, along with the word anaesthetic as an adjective to denote that state and as a generic term for agents capable of inducing the state of insensibility. In March 1848, Andrew Buchanan, MD, of Glasgow, Scotland, penned a letter to Simpson to suggest a more semantically precise word, the spelling of which is not clear in Buchanan's letter. We do not know whether Simpson replied to Buchanan. Simpson continued using the words anaesthesia and anaesthetic in his publications.

A Forgotten Contribution to Early Anesthesia Literature: The Chloroform Problem: A Textbook Unrepresentative of Contemporary Opinion.

Dr. Richard Gill published a textbook in London in 1906 titled The CHCl3 - Problem. Gill was the Chief Chloroformist at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, and was recognized as an excellent clinical anesthetist and was of an intelligent but reclusive and eccentric personality. This textbook is rarely found and has not been appreciated in the history of anesthesia for several reasons including that it was generally ignored at publication and few copies exist in libraries around the world. The CHCl3Problem is written in a verbose, archaic, and convoluted fashion and is rarely quoted. It has no references whatsoever. Gill was extensively quoted by one of his students who returned to Australia, Dr. John W Bean, which brought the book to the authors' attention. It was found on the Internet, and a copy from the Boston Medical Library had been scanned and was available as a print-on-demand.

A Newly Discovered Manuscript of Charles T. Jackson, MD, on the Preparation and Administration of Anesthetics for Humans and Animals.

A newly discovered handwritten manuscript of Charles T. Jackson, MD, contains instructions for the preparation and administration of sulfuric ether, information on Jackson's preferred mixture of ether and chloroform, an account of his experiments with other potential anesthetic agents, and his comments on etherizing cattle and other animals. Jackson's nine-page manuscript is believed to have been written in the autumn of 1851, around the time that he submitted his memorial on the discovery of etherization to Baron von Humboldt, and made a separate submission to the US Congress.

The Perfect and Famous Anesthetic Known as Methyl in Boston in 1895.

Extravagant claims were made for proprietary dental anesthetics in Boston, MA, in the late 1800s. For instance, in 1883, Urial K. Mayo introduced an inhaled Vegetable Anaesthetic comprised of nitrous oxide that had been uselessly pretreated with botanical material. This misguided concept may have been inspired by homeopathy, but it was also in line with the earlier false belief of Elton R. Smilie, Charles T. Jackson, and William T.G. Morton that sulfuric ether could volatilize opium at room temperature. In 1895, the Dental Methyl Company advertised an agent they called Methyl, a supposedly perfect topical anesthetic for painless dental extraction. The active ingredient was probably chloroform. Anesthetic humbug did not cease in Boston on Ether Day of October 16, 1846.

Noteworthy Chemistry of Chloroform.

Inhaled chloroform anesthesia was introduced in 1847. Soon thereafter, the chemical reactivity of aerobically heated chloroform permitted John Snow and Claude Bernard to do seminal experiments in the assay of drug levels and drug metabolism. However, it was not widely appreciated until a clinical mishap in 1899 that thermal decomposition generated significant levels of toxic phosgene from air-polluting quantities of chloroform in poorly ventilated operating rooms that were illuminated by flames. Phosgene is also generated metabolically from chloroform. A clue appeared in the 1950s when subanesthetic traces of inhaled chloroform proved accidentally lethal to strains of male mice spontaneously expressing high levels of chloroform-metabolizing enzymes. Furthermore, in microbial experiments of 1967, the reactive chloroform molecule was inadvertently discovered to selectively inactivate vitamin B12-dependent enzymes. Chloroform can also activate enzymes. As a solvent, it was serendipitously found in 1903 to activate what is now known as plasminogen to plasmin.