STUDY OF THE PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY OF ANAESTHESIA 155 
Brown Sequard, 1 in 18^3, confirmed Coze's observations, and added that 
circulation of fresh arterial blood through a limb which had been rigored by chloro- 
form caused a return of excitability even after a period of two to ten days. 
KOssmaul 2 independently repeated and confirmed Coze's work, and was first to 
point out that the condition was one allied to rigor and not to tetanus ; he also 
showed that, although chloroform caused precipitation in fresh extracts of muscle, the 
main action of the anaesthetic was upon the substance ot the muscle cell. Kussmaul 
was unable to repeat Brown-Seouard's observation as to recovery of irritability after 
prolonged action of chloroform. 
Ranke 3 found that frog's muscle after the long-continued action of chloroform 
vapour upon the animals became rigid, and further showed that this was, in all pro- 
bability, due to a coagulation of the myosin, as he observed a turbidity in clear 
solutions of the muscle proteid after subjecting to chloroform vapour for a period 
of three quarters of an hour. Ranke also obtained a similar turbidity, but in 
lessened degree by the action of the vapours of alcohol, ether, and amyl alcohol 
upon ' myosin ' solutions. 
Buchheim and Eisenmeyer 4 later subjected frogs to saturated chloroform 
vapour for an hour, and failed to to get Ranke's muscular rigidity. They found 
that under such circumstances all movements and the respiration stopped, and the 
frogs appeared to be dead. The muscle curves taken from the muscles after this 
treatment showed a short latent period and a normal period of contraction, but the 
relaxation was veratria-like, and only approached completion after twenty-five to 
thirty revolutions of the cylinder. 
Claude Bernard in his Legoris sur /is anassthesiques, published in 1875, recurred 
to these experiments on the rigidity and semi-coagulation of skeletal muscle when 
subjected to the action of chloroform vapour, and suggested that an analogous semi- 
coagulation probably occurs in nerve cells, and that anaesthesia may be brought about 
as a result of such a coagulation which may not be definite and fixed, that is to say, 
in which the cell substance can return structurally to its primitive state after elimina- 
tion of the toxic agent. 
A similar view was expressed by Binz, 5 who stated that sections of cerebral 
cortex placed in the one per cent, solution of hydrochlorate of morphia soon showed 
a cloudy appearance, and fine granules appeared in the nuclei ; the protoplasm also 
became granular. The stage at which the cell-protoplasm was merely cloudy, and 
not discretely granular, could be recovered from by washing away the morphia, but, 
when once the granules appeared, they could not be made to disappear again. Similar 
1. Canstatt's Jahresberichte, 1853, s. 199. Experimental Researches Applied to Physiology and Pathology, New York, 1853. 
2. Arch f. Path. Anat., Bd. xiii, 1857, S. 289. 
3. Buckhner's Repertorium, Bd. xvi, S. 374. 
4. Eckhardt's Beitrdge (1869). 
5. Vorlcsungen uher Pharmaklogie, S. 175. 
