Dr Robert Mortimer Glover FRSE (1815-1859) was an English physician. In 1838 he co-founded the Paris Medical Society and served as its first Vice President. He won the Medical Society of London’s Fothergill Gold Medal in 1846 for his lecture "On the Pathology and Treatment of Scrofula". Some 5 years prior to James Young Simpson’s use of chloroform on human patients in 1842 Glover discovered its anaesthetic qualities on laboratory animals.[1] He is sometimes called "the true discoverer of chloroform". In an ironic twist of fate he died from a chloroform overdose. Perkins-McVey argues that Glover further discovered "a new order of poisonous substances," with Glover "for the first time, proposing the existence of a unique chemical class of anaesthetic compounds, not merely by their perceived physiological effects, but by their common chemical structure, finding that 'the chemical and physiological relations of the group of halogenous elements and their compounds are in strict accordance'".[2]
- ^ http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/anaesthesia59_394_400_2004.pdf [bare URL PDF]
- ^ Perkins-McVey, Matthew (2024). "A new order of poisonous substances": revisiting Robert M. Glover's dissertation on the physiological effects of bromine, chlorine, and iodine compounds". Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Arch Pharmacol. 397 (5): 3343–3350. doi:10.1007/s00210-023-02820-y. PMID 37947840.