“It is a matter of deep regret to have to report that, since the name was given to the disease, chloralism has become widespread. It has not yet spread far among the female part of the community. It has not yet reached the poorer classes of either sex. Among the men of the middle class, among the most active of these in all its divisions—commercial, literary, medical, philosophical, artistic, clerical—chloralism, varying in intensity of evil, has appeared. In every one of these classes I have named, and in some others, I have seen the sufferers from it and have heard their testimony in relation to its effects on their organizations. Effects exceedingly uniform and, as a rule, exceedingly baneful. “At the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Edinburgh, in the year 1871, I drew earnest attention to this subject. I said, and the words were published in the reports of that year (p. 147), there is another subject of public interest connected with the employment of chloral hydrate. I refer to the increasing habitual use of it as a narcotic. As there are alcoholic intemperants and opium eaters, so, now, there are those who, beginning to take chloral hydrate to relieve pain or to procure sleep, get into the fixed habit of taking it several times daily, and in full doses. I would state from this public place, as earnestly and as forcibly as I can, that this growing practice is alike injurious to the mental, the moral, and the purely physical life, and that the confirmed habit of taking chloral hydrate leads to inevitable and confirmed disease. Under it the digestion, natural tendency to sleep, and natural sleep are impaired; the blood is changed in quality, its plastic properties and its capacity for oxidation being reduced; the secretions are depraved, and the nervous system losing its regulating, controlling power, the muscles become unsteady, the heart irregular and intermittent, and the mind excited, uncertain, and unstable. To crown the mischief, in not a few cases, already, the habitual dose has been the last; involuntary, or rather, unintentional suicide closing the scene. I press these facts on public attention not one moment too soon, and I add to them the further facts that hydrate of chloral is purely and absolutely a medicine, and that whenever its administration is not guided by medical science and experience, it ceases to be a boon and becomes a curse to mankind.