What substance became known as “anaesthesia à la reine” after it was introduced in the nineteenth century?
Chloroform. The “reine” involved was Queen Victoria, the first monarch to give birth to a child under anaesthesia. Prince Leopold, the Queen’s eighth child, was born in 1853, after her physician, Dr. John Snow, had administered chloroform by holding a handkerchief saturated with the chemical over her majesty’s mouth. The results were so satisfactory that the Queen asked for chloroform for her next delivery as well, after which the chemical came to be known in Britain as “anaesthesia à la reine.” Chloroform was first made by the French chemist Jean-Baptiste Dumas, who reacted acetic acid with chlorine, but its use as an anaesthetic was pioneered by James Simpson, a Scottish physician. On the fourth of November, 1847, Simpson and his friends, aware of the euphoria-inducing effects of substances such as laughing gas (nitrous oxide) and ether, sought a little entertainment by inhaling chloroform. After some initial hilarity, they all passed out. Simpson’s reaction, on waking, was that “thi
