Queen Victoria was the first monarch to give birth to a child under anesthesia. 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 the royal 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 “anesthesia a la Reine.” Chloroform was first made by the French chemist Jean Baptiste Dumas by reacting acetic acid with chlorine, but its use as an anesthetic was pioneered by James Simpson, a Scottish physician. On the fourth of November, 1847, Simpson and his friends were in search of some entertainment and experimented with inhaling various substances without success. They then tried chloroform. After some initial hilarity, Simpson and pals passed out. His reaction, on waking, was "this is far stronger and better than ether." Ether had been
Some argue that prescription drug ads inform patients about diseases and possible treatments, encourage people to seek medical advice, help remove stigma associated with medical conditions, and provide needed sales revenue to fund costly research and development (R&D) of new drugs, while others argue that drug ads misinform patients, promote drugs before long-term safety-profiles can be known, medicalize and stigmatize normal conditions and bodily functions like wrinkles and low testosterone, waste valuable medical appointment time, and have led to our society’s overuse of prescription drugs.