The first operation under ether in Great Britain was performed by Liston at University College Hospital in December, 1846. In January, 1847, James Young Simpson commenced to employ it in midwifery cases in Edinburgh. Simpson had already acquired a high reputation as a gynecologist, and was an enthusiast in his profession. Delighted though he was with the results of his trials of ether, he felt sure that an anæsthetic with more lasting effect could be found or made, and with characteristic courage and pertinacity he and his two assistants, Drs. Keith and Duncan, carried on personal experiments at Simpson’s private house on such evenings as they could spare. At the same time the scientific world was appealed to for suggestions. About this time David Waldie, a Scotch pharmacist then settled in Liverpool, where he was manager of the Liverpool Apothecaries Company, was visiting Edinburgh and had a conversation with Simpson on his absorbing topic. Waldie had had some special experience with chloric ether at Liverpool, and had made experiments on its chemical character, which had led him to the conclusion that the chloric ether then used was chemically only a mixture of chloroform with some undecomposed spirit. Chloroform, it must be remembered, was then but little known. Dr. Samuel Guthrie, formerly an army surgeon, but later practising at Jewelsville, Jefferson County, N.Y., published an account of a chloric ether he had made from alcohol and chloride of lime in May, 1831. In October of the same year Soubeiran in France, and a month later Liebig in Germany, announced the discovery of a similar compound. None of these products was an absolute chloroform, but all were heavy substances. Dr. Guthrie called his chloric ether, and familiarly sweet whisky, Soubeiran’s was a bichloric ether, and Liebig described his as a trichloride of carbon, but Dumas showed in 1834 that the essential substance was a trichloride of formyl, HCCl_{3} and a substitution product of marsh gas. He invented the name chloroform. It appears too that another French chemist, Flourens, in March, 1847, reported to the Academy of Sciences of Paris some experiments he had made with chloroform on animals, which indicated its anæsthetic properties; but probably neither Simpson nor Waldie was aware of this paper. This was the chemical which Waldie recommended to Simpson in the summer of 1847, and the chemist promised to send some to Simpson on his return to Liverpool. A fire in the laboratory of his establishment prevented the fulfilment of this promise, and also, Waldie said, prevented him from experimenting on himself with chloroform, as he had intended to do. Simpson got chloroform from Duncan and Flockhart in Edinburgh, but did not expect it would answer on account of its density. The sample was set aside for some time, but on November 4, 1847, he and Duncan and Keith resolved to test it. They all inhaled some from a tumbler, and almost immediately became loquacious and hilarious.