Ep 2: The Dreadful Discovery of Chloroform (The Etherist, Season 3)

The discovery of chloroform was closely intertwined with ether anesthesia because of the relative closeness of their discoveries, but it did not take long for the early pioneers of anesthesia use to understand the enormous difference between the two anesthetic agents.

From October 1846 to November 1847, anesthesia providers used ether to ease pain in surgery and it might have seemed as if a golden age in medicine was just beginning, but tragedy would eventually strike the growing specialty of anesthesiology. Hannah Greener’s experience with the use of chloroform anesthesia as a patient would mark a major crisis point for the early advocates of anesthesia.

This season of the series is about revisiting the history of anesthesiology while also reimagining those events based on what we know today. But that story can’t be told without also diving into the dangers of the use of anesthesia. It is perhaps the most important piece of knowledge that we possess now, that those early anesthesiologists were not sufficiently aware of at the time.

This is episode 2 of season 3 of “Anesthesiology News presents The Etherist.”

Sponsored by Masimo and Medtronic.

Suggested ReadingFenster JM. _Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America’s Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It._ Perennial; 2002.Knight PR III, Bacon DR. An unexplained death: Hannah Greener and chloroform. Anesthesiology. 2002;96:1250–1253.

Mets B. Leadership in Anaesthesia: Five Pioneers of the Deadly Quest for Surgical Insensibility. Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 2021.

Mets B. Waking Up Safer?: An Anesthesiologist’s Record. SilverWood Books; 2018.

Snow SJ. Blessed Days of Anaesthesia: How Anaethetics Changed the World. Oxford University Press; 2008.

Sykes K, Bunker J. Anaesthesia and the Practice of Medicine: Historical Perspectives. 1st ed. CRC Press; 2007.

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