ON ANAESTHETICS 153 
between the sighs became greater and greater, till I began to fear their entire 
cessation. However, normal respiration returned, and in the course of a few 
minutes she got up and sat in a chair beside the fire. But she had not been 
there long before the same strange slow breathing came on again, as if she would 
sigh her life away, and I believe that if I had not had her put back promptly 
to bed she would actually have died. Here a feeble frame was further weakened 
by the potent narcotic, and it happened that the effect told especially upon 
the respiratory function, with the peculiarity that it was manifested not during 
the administration of the chloroform, but subsequently. 
With these examples before us of deviations from the usual order in which 
the various functions of the nervous system are affected by chloroform, no one 
can say it is impossible that here and there an individual may be found so con- 
stituted that, without any undue proportion of the narcotic vapour to the air 
inhaled, the cardiac ganglia may fail before the respiration is interfered with. 
But while freely admitting that such a thing is possible, I must repeat my firm 
conviction that this kind of idiosyncrasy is certainly ‘so rare that it may practi- 
cally be left out of consideration altogether ’. 
The danger of chloroform may be compared, not inaptly, to that of railway 
travelling. In both cases the risk incurred by any individual is so small that 
it does not enter seriously into our calculations. And just as railway accidents 
are generally occasioned by culpable mismanagement, so death from chloroform 
is almost invariably due to faulty administration. 
Various attempts have been made during the last nine years to improve 
our anaesthetic methods. Among these must be mentioned the reassertion of 
the claims of sulphuric ether by the late Dr. Mason Warren, of Boston, in 
America. Our transatlantic brethren naturally feel indignant that their grand 
discovery of anaesthesia in surgery should be confounded with the very secondary 
matter of finding out that a different agent from that which they employed 
will produce similar effects in a more efficient manner. For the introduction 
of chloroform, when the whole subject was a novelty, led to a confusion in the 
public mind in this country, where ‘the discovery of chloroform’ is often re- 
garded as identical with the discovery of anaesthesia. And there can be no 
doubt that if sulphuric ether were still in use in Britain as it is in Boston, and 
if chloroform were now brought forward for the first time as a substitute for it, 
comparatively little would be thought of the innovation. More convenient 
chloroform undoubtedly is, on account of its smaller bulk, and the greater 
facility of its administration, but Dr. Warren contended that these advantages 
were more than counterbalanced by the greater safety of ether, which he declared 
had never up to the time of his writing produced a single death." Admitting 
* See Surgical Observations, with Cases and Operations, by J. Mason Warren, M.D., &c. 
