3
without any fear of accidental death, if only the respiration, and nothing but
the respiration, is carefully attended to throughout."
8. In forwarding the report to Government, Surgeon-Major Lawrie stated
that " the results of the experiments harmonise with the principles necessary
for the safe administration of chloroform taught by Mr. Syme, who never had a
fatal case, and with my own experience, which is founded upon those principles.
I have killed scores of dogs with chloroform, and in every instance death has
resulted from failure of the respiratory function. I have also given chloroform
in surgery, without a death, for more than twenty years—during the last fifteen
years several (five to ten) times every day—and I have never seen syncope or
failure of the heart's action produced by it. Finally, it may be mentioned that
the Hyderabad Commission have searched the records of accidental deaths from
chloroform in Great Britain. since the year 1855, and they find that there is not
a single death from chloroform recorded, in which it was proved that the
respiration alone was attended to throughout the inhalation".
9. The report was forwarded to " The Lancet" and other medical journals
in due course, and the reception it met with, as well as the circumstances which
led to the appointment of the second Chloroform Commission, are rendered
clear by the following quotations from " The Lancet":
[ " The Lancet," March 2, 1889.]
In a report of the recent prize distribution at the Hyderabad Medical School, which appeared in
our issue of February 23rd, some remarks of Surgeon-Major Lawrie, M.B., M.R.C.S., of the Bengal
Army Medical Service, are mentioned, which deserve some comment. We learn that a Commission
had been appointed to investigate the action of chloroform, and that the result of the researches
made upon pariah dogs was that these animals were killed from respiratory failure, and in no case did
cardiac syncope occur directly. Unfortunately Mr. Lawrie contents himself with bare statements of
results, adding that these results tally with his own experience, which he believes to be uniquely large.
Mr. Lawrie, as a disciple of Simpson and Syme, arrives at conclusions consonant with the teaching of
those great clinicians, but utterly at variance with the experience alike of experiment and practice as
carried out in Europe. We should require more than the scanty statements of experiments performed
upon dogs—notoriously nonsusceptible to chloroform syncope—before we could accept the conclusions
of the Hyderabad Commission when they appear to go in the very teeth of those at which the
Commission appointed by the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society and by the British Medical
Association arrived, and, further, are opposed to the careful and painstaking . experiments of such
scientific observers as Snow, Claude Bernard,* McKendrick, and. others too numerous to mention.
All those who are familiar with chloroform are well aware that syncope, when primary, as a rule super-
venes in the initial stages of inhalation, while secondary syncope due to respiratory embarrassment is
the result of accumulation of chloroform in the blood leading to paralysis of the medullary centres,
* This is a mistake on the part of the writer in " The Lancet," vide page 19 of this Report.