Justus von Liebig (1803–1873), Oskar Liebreich (1839–1908)
Devotees of film noir and mysteries know that the main ingredient in the infamous “knockout drops” or “Mickey Finn” is chloral hydrate. As the story goes, after the chemical is surreptitiously slipped into an alcoholic beverage, the unsuspecting victim drinks it, loses consciousness, and awakens hours later—robbed, kidnapped, or date-raped.
The distinguished German chemist Justus von Liebig first synthesized chloral hydrate in 1832 at the University of Giessen, which was renamed in his honor after World War II. Known as the Father of the Fertilizer Industry, he is far better known for discovering that nitrogen is an essential plant nutrient. In the late 1860s, Oskar Liebreich, a German pharmacologist at Berlin University, discovered that, in the presence of alkali, chloral hydrate breaks down into chloroform and formic acid. Liebreich speculated that the same reaction might occur in the body, and that the body’s release of chloroform would produce a sedative effect. The results were right but the theory was wrong: Chloral hydrate produces sleep but not because it forms chloroform in the body.
Introduced into medicine in 1869, chloral hydrate rapidly became a very widely used, relatively safe hypnotic (sleep-producing) drug. In the 1869 hypnotic market, chloral hydrate’s primary rivals were alcohol, opium, and cannabis. From a historic perspective, it was among the first synthetic drugs developed exclusively in the laboratory and not obtained from a plant or an animal source.
In the twentieth century, barbital and other barbiturates—and, later, Librium and related benzodiazepines—displaced chloral hydrate. It continues to be used, albeit to a very limited extent, as a hypnotic and to calm patients before surgery. Chloral hydrate can be deadly when combined with alcohol, other depressants, or opiates—it may have played a role in the deaths of two blonde bombshells: Marilyn Monroe in 1962 and Anna Nicole Smith in 2007. Their mysterious deaths are consistent with the film-noir tradition.
SEE ALSO Alcohol (c. 10,000 BCE), Cannabis (c. 3000 BCE), Opium (c. 2500 BCE), Chloroform (1847), Barbital (1903), Phenobarbital (1912), Nembutal and Seconal (1928), Librium (1960), Rohypnol (1975), Ambien (1992).
Franscisco Goya’s Caprichos plate no. 43 (1799) bears the inscription, “The dream of reason brings forth monsters.”