15 
UNDER CHLOROFORM. 
By B. W. RICHARDSON, M.D., F.R.S. 
I HAVE taken as the text of one or two papers, the familiar 
title given above, not with the strict intention of confining 
what I have to say to the one subject, chloroform. But, accept- 
ing chloroform as a type of a number of chemical substances 
which possess the property of inducing sleep and insensibility, 
I propose rather to consider the general subject of sleep and 
insensibility as induced by artificial means. It will be my 
object to write so simple an account of the progress of discovery 
on the subject in hand, that the intelligent reader may easily 
follow me and may, in the end, feel himself in safe possession 
of all the more important truths which modern science has 
brought to light in relation to anaesthesia. 
Historical Notes. 
The practice of destroying, or rather of suspending con- 
sciousness, for and during the performance of surgical opera- 
tions, although it has been developed in our time, is as old as 
the practice of administering soothing remedies for the relief 
of pain in the course of disease. The reference to mandragora 
so often made in classical works of old, and in some of our 
earliest English poets, bears on the employment of an agent of 
this kind. Mandragora, or mandrake, belongs to the natural 
order of plants Solanacece , and is of the same genus as the 
Atropa belladonna , deadly nightshade. The Atropa mandra- 
gora is a plant common to the Isles of Greece, and was used 
by the early Greek physicians as a sedative in various ways. 
The plant is said to be more determinate in its action than 
belladonna , and the odour is much more unpleasant. Very 
soon after the introduction of ether as an anaesthetic, Sir 
James Simpson pointed out that the mandrake had been re- 
commended by Dioscorides for the specific purpose of making 
surgical art painless, and he quoted the passages in which the 
plan is described. “ Some persons,’’ says Dioscorides, “ boil the 
