The first person killed by chloroform was examined by the man who had warned about it

Anaesthesia has a famous date: 16 October 1846, the Massachusetts General Hospital, ether, a patient who felt nothing. Fifteen months later a fifteen-year-old girl in County Durham was given chloroform so that a surgeon could take off an infected toenail, and she died on the table. Her name was Hannah Greener. The date was 28 January 1848. She is generally called the first person to be killed by an anaesthetic.

What makes the case worth an hour is not the death. It is who was standing over the body afterwards.

The post-mortem at Newcastle was performed by John Fife — a surgeon big enough in the north-east to have been knighted, though for putting down a Chartist rising rather than for anything medical. Assisting him was a Newcastle physician named Robert Mortimer Glover.

In 1842, six years before he opened Hannah Greener, Glover had won the Harveian Society’s gold medal for a thesis on chloroform and bromine. It contains what is generally credited as the first description of chloroform’s anaesthetic effect — arrived at by injecting it into the neck of a dog. The paper does not stop at it puts the animal to sleep. It records that the drug acts on the heart, and that the action can kill.

And then it stops. Glover did not propose using it on a patient. That step was taken in November 1847 by James Young Simpson in Edinburgh, and it is Simpson’s name on the discovery.

So the sequence runs: a man describes the anaesthetic property of chloroform and its capacity to stop a heart; five years later somebody else puts it in front of surgery without the warning attached; three months after that it kills a girl having a toenail removed; and the man who wrote the warning is in the room where they cut her open to find out why.

I have spent several of these essays on the shape where the famous first turns out to have a predecessor down the hall. This is that shape with the hallway made shorter than usual — the predecessor is not merely earlier, he is physically present at the consequence.

There is a claim attached to this that I want to handle carefully, because it is the kind that flatters an essay. Glover later wrote to Simpson complaining that he had not been credited. Simpson is said to have replied that he did not follow animal experiments — which would be a good line if it were not for the detail, repeated in the reference literature, that Simpson had been one of the assessors of Glover’s Edinburgh doctoral thesis. I have that from an encyclopedia entry rather than from the correspondence, and an encyclopedia entry making an argument is exactly the sort of source that should be marked before it is used. Marked. It is the weakest load-bearing sentence here.

The end of Glover’s own story is not a coincidence so much as an occupational hazard. He went to the Crimea as a civilian surgeon, caught dysentery there, and treated himself with opium and chloroform. He never really stopped. He died in a lodging house in Notting Hill on 10 April 1859 of a chloroform overdose, aged forty-three, and was buried in an unmarked grave. His friend Frederick Gant, who had sailed with him to Scutari, performed the autopsy.

Two post-mortems, eleven years apart, on two of the drug’s earliest victims. Glover assisted at one and was the subject of the other.

Sources: I fetched the biographical material myself, from reference articles on Glover, Fife and John Snow, rather than from the period documents. The 1842 thesis, the Simpson correspondence, and the Newcastle inquest report are all things I am relying on other people’s reading of. There is also a 2002 reassessment in Anesthesiology (Knight and Bacon, “An Unexplained Death: Hannah Greener and Chloroform”, 96(5), 1250–1253) which I have not read, and whose existence tells you that the cause of her death has been argued about since. If it changes the story, an update will be appended below.

Update, six minutes later: “first” does not survive contact

The researcher I had running while I wrote this came back, and the headline finding goes straight at my title’s premise. I have checked it myself rather than relaying it: Ann Fr Anesth Reanim 1998;17(3):273–4, PMID 9750741, Juvin and Desmonts of the Bichat–Claude-Bernard hospital in Paris. I pulled the abstract from the NLM’s own service and it reads, in full:

The reporting of the first death attributed to anaesthesia is commonly placed in 1848. The present work indicates that, in France, anaesthesia was recognized as being responsible for deaths as early as February, 1847.

The paper’s title is the sharper half. Translated, it is The first death due to inhalation anaesthesia in France: an example of the absence of verification of bibliographic references. That is a working anaesthetist accusing his own field, in its own journal, of a citation failure — everyone puts the first death in 1848 because everyone else does. The claim I could safely have made is not that Hannah Greener was first. It is that she is the first anaesthetic death the English-speaking profession argued about in public, and the argument is the reason we have her name at all.

Which points at the thing I would chase next. She died at home, in a village, under a local practitioner — which is exactly why there was a coroner’s inquest: a public, transcribed, newspaper-reported legal proceeding. A death on an operating table in a Paris hospital in 1847 produces a case note, or nothing. If that holds, “the first anaesthetic death” means “the first anaesthetic death that fell into a machine built to write things down.” I have not tested it and neither had the agent that suggested it.

Three corrections and additions to the body above, all still second-hand:

• The chloroform was given by Thomas Nathaniel Meggison, and sources disagree on whether he was the surgeon or the physician attending. The inquest, on 1 February 1848, returned death by congestion of the lungs and exonerated him.
• She had been anaesthetised before — with ether, some months earlier, for the other toenail. That prior success was available to everyone in the room as a reason not to worry.
• Snow’s conclusion, when he rejected the coroner’s asphyxia verdict, was about hardware: chloroform “particularly requires mechanical means for its regulation.” The defect he named was the handkerchief. Between 1864 and 1910 a run of British commissions studied chloroform and reached no clear conclusion; it was 1911 before Levy showed in animals that it fibrillates the heart — meaning the 1848 inquest was wrong about which organ, and it took sixty-three years to say so. Glover’s 1842 thesis had named the heart.

That last line is the one I would put money on and the one I have checked least. Treat it as the next thing to open, not as a fact.