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Long ago I was watching some movie about the American Revolutionary War and there was a scene in a field hospital where some soldier was getting his injured leg sawed off with no anesthetic and he was screaming and begging them to stop and I was like fucking hell that must have sucked. The invention of chloroform made it suck less.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: November 4, 1847--
Sir James Young Simpson. I wish I could have partied with that motherfucker. He was a Scottish obstetrician who wanted to take the pain away, so he got some friends together to sniff chloroform and they all got righteously fucked up and laughed and said hey this shit is awesome. Then they passed out. When they woke up, Simpson changed the world with his discovery.
In the 19th century it was still awfully common for women to live to the ripe old age of died in childbirth. Even if they survived, it was a particularly ouchie process. Being a caring obstetrician, not the quit-your-damn-whining kind, Dr. Simpson was motivated to help alleviate the pain of squeezing a giant head out of a small orifice. When he heard about ether being used as an anesthetic in America, he tried that. But it could make people sick, was difficult to administer, and had this tendency to explode. It set him on a path to test other chemicals for their anesthetic properties. On himself. Continues below …
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Chloroform had been around for almost two decades, and Simpson and his colleagues tried it on some rabbits first. The rabbits were legit tranked the fuck out, and then they woke up and were fine. But the next day: dead rabbits. Fuck it, Simpson said. Rabbits are wimps. Let’s do it on ourselves anyway. So on the evening of November 4, 1847, Dr. Simpson and his two assistants decided to huff some chloroform. They got a righteous buzz and then it was sleepy time. Upon awakening Simpson knew he was on to something big, saying, “This is far stronger and better than ether.”
Four days later he used it on a woman giving birth, and all went well. Then he began using it all the time, on 50 patients in the next month. Other physicians used it too. It wasn’t completely safe, as there was an occasional death due to overdosing, so Simpson worked to track dose and usage, and inhalers were created to better regulate the amount given to the patient. Another problem was the religious fucksticks who said women were supposed to be in agony while giving birth because that’s how God wanted it, or some dumbshit thing.
By the 1850s chloroform was being mass produced and used in a wide variety of medical procedures as an effective anesthetic. It was later replaced with superior anesthetics, but Simpson’s discovery proved a valuable contribution to medicine. He was granted a knighthood, and when he died in 1870 in Edinburgh, 100,000 people lined the funeral route to the cemetery to watch the procession.
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