Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/508

492 1868, the late Mr. Daniel Hanbury, F. R. S., brought with him to the meeting, from Germany, a specimen of the hydrate and a brief verbal account of the phenomena which it had been found to produce on living bodies. The facts related by Mr. Hanbury proved of so much interest to the members of the Biological Section, that they elected me, who had just been submitting a report on an allied subject, to make a further and special report during the meeting on this particular subject. I accepted the duty at once, and conducted a series of experimental researches, the results of which were duly laid before the section on the last day of the meeting. The results were among the most singular I had ever witnessed, and the report upon them raised an intense curiosity among the medical men and the men of science in this country. Liebreich's discovery became the physiological event of the year, and for some months I was engaged, at every leisure moment, in demonstrating the various and unique facts which that discovery had brought forth.

In this chloral hydrate we were found to possess an agent very soluble and manageable, which, introduced into the body of a man or other animal, quickly caused the deepest possible sleep, a sleep prolonged for many hours, and which could be brought so near to the sleep of death that an animal in it might pass for dead and still recover. In this substance we also found we had an agent which was actually decomposed within the blood, and which in its decomposition yielded the product chloroform which caused the sleep; a product which distilled over, as it were, from the blood into the nervous structure, and gave rise to the deep narcotism.

The discovery of Liebreich opened a new world of research, the lessons derived from which I shall never forget. And yet, now that ten years have passed away, and I have lived to see the influence on mankind of what is in one sense a beneficent, and in another sense a maleficent substance, I almost feel a regret that I took any part whatever in the introduction of the agent into the practice of healing and the art of medicine.

About three months after my report was read at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science the first painful experience resulting from chloral hydrate came under my knowledge. A medical man of middle age and comfortable circumstances took, either by accident or intention, what was computed to be a dose of 190 grains of chloral hydrate. He had bought, a few days before this event, 240 grains of the substance. He took a first dose of ten grains in order to procure sleep. On a following night he took twenty grains, and on the evening of the succeeding day twenty grains more. These administrations were known. He had reduced his store by these takings to 190 grains, and, while in a state of semi-consciousness from the last quantity, he got up from the bed on which he was reclining, and emptied all the remaining contents of the bottle into a small