The development of inhalation anaesthesia : with special reference to the years 1846-1900... / [Barbara M. Duncum].
- Duncum, Barbara M.
- Date:
- 1947
Licence: In copyright
Credit: The development of inhalation anaesthesia : with special reference to the years 1846-1900... / [Barbara M. Duncum]. Source: Wellcome Collection.
468/664 page 448
![Snow [cf. pp. 188-90], Grehant [*], Paul Bert, and Dubois [cf. pp. 370, 374] with reference to the percentage of chloroform required lor various degrees of anaesthesia, and the percentage of chloroform in the fluids and tissues of animals variously anaes- thetized.' 2 In July of the same year, 1901, a new Chloroform Committee, under the chairmanship of Waller, was appointed by the British Medical Association. The Committee was originally composed of Doctors Barr, Dudley Buxton, Sherrington, Waller himself, and Sir Victor Horsley. Its aim was ' to investigate methods of quantitatively determining the presence of chloroform in the air, and in the living body '. The Committee co-opted A. G. Vernon Harcourt, the physical chemist of Christ Church, Oxford, ' who has devised an accurate and comparatively expeditious method of combustion by means of a platinum wire raised to incandescence by an electric current. The method was originally applicable to mixtures of chloroform and air enclosed in a flask.3 In connexion with the present inquiry Harcourt has devised a modification by which the combustion and acidimetry can be effected on a mixture in transit '.4 The chief practical outcome of the Committee's work was the production of Vernon Harcourt's regulating apparatus for delivering low percentages of chloroform. It was claimed that the maximum strength of chloroform vapour in the chloroform- air mixture was thereby automatically limited to about 2 per cent.5 In 1902 E. H. Embley, Honorary Anaesthetist to the Mel- bourne Hospital, published a detailed account of his researches on ' the causation of death during the administration of chloro- form '. He believed that he had succeeded in demonstrating what Dastre, for example, had previously maintained (cf. p. 397), namely, that ' vagus inhibition is, in dogs, the great factor in the causation of sudden death under chloroform '. 1 Waller apparently referred to a short series of experiments made by Grehant in 1874. The latter anaesthetized animals by making them breathe from a balloon a quantity of chloroform which he had found to be proportionate to their body weight ; e.g. for a dog weighing 10 kilograms Grehant introduced into the bag 100 litres of air and 20 grams of chloroform. This quantity, he claimed, produced tranquil anaesthesia indefinitely, whereas a smaller quantity of chloroform failed to produce anaesthesia and a greater quantity was liable to produce death. (C.R. Soc. Biol. Paris, 1874, I» 269-70.) 2 Brit. med. J., 1901, i, 447-8. 3 J. chem. Soc, 1899, 75, 1060-6. 4 Brit. med. J., 1902, ii, 116-17. Ibid. 1903, ii, Supplement, cxli-clxi ; ibid. 1904, ii, 169.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20457200_0472.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
