Breaking the Barrier of Pain:

The Use of Chloroform in 19th Century Obstetrics

Kaitlyn Jorgensen, Melodi Fugate, Victoria Valdivia

Junior Division

Group Website

Student Composed Words: 495

Process Paper: 495

 Process Paper

We chose the topic “Breaking the Barrier of Pain: The Use of Chloroform in 19th

Century Obstetrics” because one of our group members,Victoria Valdivia, strives to be in the

medical field as a behavioral analyst. She is looking into other fields before she decides on what

to specialize in and being a young woman, was drawn to this topic. This project gives us the

opportunity to learn about women’s health and the evolution of anesthesia that has helped

women overcome the many barriers and complications that come with childbirth. We had no

idea how vital the discovery of chloroform was for all fields of medicine in the nineteenth

century, especially obstetrics. As we continued researching, we learned fascinating truths about

who identified chloroform as a successful anesthetic and how it positively impacted the mortality

rates of women in labor and their children. These facts and more are now displayed on our

website.

Our research was conducted using several different reliable resources. We began by using

the Gale Research Database to learn about both chloroform and ether. Using these sources, we

identified James Young Simpson as the obstetrician who first exposed and tested chloroform as

an anesthetic. Now we began to focus on Simpson and how discovered and used chloroform. We

went to the Alvin Sherman Library at Nova Southeastern University where we were able to

access their database which had many valuable resources. These online articles gave us many

biographies on James Young Simpson and helped us understand the process of discrediting ether

and bringing forth chloroform. We continued to delve deeper and found a book written by Eve

Blantyre Simpson, James’ daughter. This book gave us an inside view on Simpson’s career and
life that helped give us an even deeper understanding of this man and his journey to bring

chloroform into the obstetric field.

We created a website for this year's National History Day because we are able to

uniquely display our hard work so that others may vividly experience the evolution of anesthesia

that has made our society what it is today. A website allows viewers to view images, video clips,

and information that all work together to help the audience understand the development of

chloroform, its uses, its origins, as well as both its supporters and resistors.

The 2019-2020 National History Day Theme is “Breaking Barriers in History”. Our topic

had many barriers that were shattered once chloroform was introduced. Chloroform was the first

anesthetic to truly erase all pain, to not cause irritation of the lungs, to not cause a foul odor, to

put the patient into a deep sleep necessary for surgery and/or conception of child, and to be

non-flammable. These qualities qualified it to replace its predecessor, ether, and become the

general anesthetic used during procedures. Moreover, chloroform broke many barriers which led

it to become the most widely used anesthetic in the nineteenth century, and bring our topic

within the constraints of the NHD theme.