Queen Victoria was the first monarch to give birth to a child under anesthesia. Prince Leopold, the Queen’s eighth child, was born in 1853 after her physician Dr. John Snow had administered chloroform by holding a handkerchief saturated with the chemical over the royal mouth. The results were so satisfactory that the Queen asked for chloroform for her next delivery as well, after which the chemical came to be known in Britain as “anesthesia a la Reine.” Chloroform was first made by the French chemist Jean Baptiste Dumas by reacting acetic acid with chlorine, but its use as an anesthetic was pioneered by James Simpson, a Scottish physician. On the fourth of November, 1847, Simpson and his friends were in search of some entertainment and experimented with inhaling various substances without success. They then tried chloroform. After some initial hilarity, Simpson and pals passed out. His reaction, on waking, was "this is far stronger and better than ether." Ether had been