Description
Chloroform
Pharmacy bottle - Apothecary - Herboristerie
Late 19th century, early 20th century
Glass blown at the mouth because there remains the depression of the stem of the cane under the jar, a sign of tearing off of the glassmaker’s cane. Plug made of sheet metal.
Stencilled enamel label.
Chlorof label: for chloroform
Discovered in the early 1830s, chloroform revolutionized modern medicine by becoming, alongside ether, one of the first general inhalation anesthetics used in surgery.
If chloroform has made spectacular advances in making surgical procedures painless, its medical use was gradually abandoned in the 20th century for several major reasons:
Cardiac toxicity and chloroform syncope: It could cause severe arrhythmias or sudden cardiac arrest during anesthesia.
Hepatotoxicity: Exposure to chloroform frequently resulted in post-operative liver damage such as liver necrosis.
Very narrow therapeutic margin: The limit between the dose needed for anesthesia and the lethal dose was extremely low.
Its use has thus been supplanted by safer anaesthetics, relegating chloroform to synthetic chemistry.
It comes from an old cellar-laboratory in a Parisian pharmacy. The bottles had not moved since the late 1950s on the shelves. The cellar had served as a laboratory for medical analyses and a laboratory for magistral preparations of the pharmacy from 1900 until around 1950.
This large-capacity jar was a reserve jar intended for the storage of raw materials to be processed into powders, tinctures or infusions in the pharmacy laboratory.
Diameter 8cm. Height with cap 23cm
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