bler of water, and swallowed the large dose so prepared. He was found insensible, with the bottle and glass by his bedside. He did not fully regain consciousness for sixty hours, but finally made a good recovery.
The occurrence of this experience led me into a new line of research, namely, to find out what was the best mode of maintaining life while the body is under the influence of a deep sleep from the hydrate. This new research disclosed that the great object of treatment should be to sustain the animal temperature. I found that, like alcohol, the tendency of chloral hydrate is to reduce the vital fire, and that of two animals under chloral, one in a warm, the other in a cold atmosphere, the recovery of the one in the warm and the death of the one in the cold atmosphere could be reduced to a matter of positive system or rule. I had soon to publish that lesson, and to indicate that there were dangers ahead in respect to the use of chloral hydrate, which dangers would have to be scientifically combated.
Within a year after the introduction of chloral hydrate into medical use another new truth dawned on me. One morning the friends of a gentleman called on me, bringing a bottle of chloral hydrate and a copy of a medical paper containing a lecture of mine relating to the action of the drug. They had noticed for some time past that the gentleman, about whom they were anxious, had been very peculiar in manner, exhibiting signs resembling those of intoxication from alcohol, but with more than alcoholic somnolency. He was an alcoholic, and sometimes he was apt to have spells of inebriation; but the phenomena more recently observed were somewhat different. Watching him closely as their alarms increased, they detected that he was in the habit of dosing himself with some substance which he kept in a series of bottles, of which he had seventeen or eighteen in stock, and one of which they brought to me. The bottle they brought contained chloral hydrate, and it turned out that all the bottles contained, or had contained, the same. By and by this gentleman came to me himself, and confessed that he was in the habit of taking the chloral three or four times in the twenty-four hours. He took it at first, after reading my lecture on its medicinal uses, in order to procure sleep. It answered his purpose so well that he became induced to repeat the process, and in a little time got what he called his new craving. He presented a series of special symptoms from the chloral which had some of the characters of jaundice and some of the characters of scurvy. These symptoms were additional to the signs of brain and nervous disturbance caused by the chloroform derived from the chloral, and they were easily accounted for. The chloral, in undergoing decomposition within the body, divides into two products, the one chloroform, the other an alkaline formate, a soluble salt, which makes the blood unduly fluid, and acts much in the same manner—as I found again by direct experiment with it—that common salt does, or the mixture of pickling
