The rate of the assumption of chloroform by the blood during anæsthesia

Abstract

Although it is obvious that the essential condition of anæsthesia is one in which chloroform is associated with the cells of the body, and among these the cells of the central nervous system, the gradual storing-up of the drug must depend upon the supply available in the blood, the red corpuscles of which are, as we have shown, the chief agents for the transport of chloroform either from or to the pulmonary alveoli. A definite threshold-value for the percentage of chloroform in arterial blood must be reached in order that anæsthesia shall occur, and the state be maintained. The drug, as Tissot, Nicloux, and ourselves have found, is eliminated at first rapidly, and subsequently more slowly, on the cessation of the administration of chloroform. During anæsthesia the drug does not simply accumulate, since the processes of intake and output go on side by side. Though chloroform is eliminated at first with great rapidity, the last traces of the drug take a long time to slowly leak out of the tissues, but apart from this fact the elimination of a high percentage of chloroform in the blood takes place nearly as rapidly, and perhaps at times even as rapidly, as the assumption of a high percentage.