USE OF CHLOROFORM IN SURGERY. 683 
the presence of a very minute quantity of oxygen in the 
nitrogen. 
These appear, from my experiments, to be the changes 
produced ; but this part of the subject I have not as yet 
minutely examined, and my experiments have hitherto been 
made on healthy urine ; but I have ascertained that several 
of the substances found in urine during disease, as, for 
example, sugar, albumen, bile, and excess of urinary colouring 
matter, produce scarcely any effect on the results obtained 
by this new method of determining the quantity of urea in 
the urinary secretion. 
ON THE USE OE CHLOROEORM IN SURGERY. 
By J. E. Erichsen, Esq., F.R.C.S., Surgeon to University 
College Hospital. 
Mr. Erichsen lately delivered a highly interesting and 
practical lecture on the use of chloroform in surgical opera- 
tions, a subject which seems not to have attracted that specific 
attention in the shape of clinical lectures that its importance 
deserves. Mr. Erichsen commenced* by dwelling on the 
very great boon to humanity the use of anaesthetics had proved, 
lessening human suffering and, pro tanto , depriving surgery 
of many of those disagreeable features which it must always, 
more or less, present to the popular understanding and feeling. 
“ Chloroform has proved an immense boon,” said the lec- 
turer; “if any of us were to undergo an operation, what a 
matter of resignation and satisfaction it is for us to know we 
can undergo now without pain what before was surrounded 
with torture and misery. There are positive advantages, too, 
in the use of chloroform. We are not now, as surgeons, 
harrassed by the shrieks and cries of the patient, which even 
the most manly and resolute surgeon cannot disregard; nor 
are we, in operations, as before, obliged to operate c against 
time.’ Every second given unnecessarily to an operation, 
before the introduction of chloroform, was an age or world of 
pain and torture to our patient ; now, the sleep of chloroform 
makes the patient forget everything, and if we might be for 
once poetical, the patient might with Helena, in the Midsummer 
Night's Dream , hail it as a boon as 
“ Sleep that sometimes shuts up sorrow’s eye. 
Stealing one awhile from one’s own company.” 
