Chloroform in fiction

The problem with chloroform is that the dosage is very difficult to get right. Too little and your victim is not rendered unconscious. Too much and your victim may never wake up again or suffer serious damage. Plus, there are better and safer anaesthetics around these days, so chloroform is rarely used. It's not all that easy to come by anymore either, since many of the legitimate uses (solvents, dry-cleaners, highschool chemistry labs) have evaporated. I have used chloroform in a story once, but that one was set in the 1930s, where there weren't all that many available alternatives to chloroform and ether. Plus, it was the sort of pulpy story where chloroform would have been expected.

As for what to use instead, I'd probably go with an injection with an undefined but quick acting anaesthetic. This seems to have replaced chloroform as the go-to drug for movie kidnappers these days. And if the substance is undefined, you don't run the risk of a reader letting you now that substance X doesn't work that way.  

I had the same problem with one of my stories and as a newbie I just had to get it right. I had done my
research on Chloroform and had the same reservations. Then I came across Dean Wesley Smith's blog and read this;

[I hope he doesn't sue me for quoting this here. ]

"But this chapter, and all the chapters in this book, talk about fiction writing, and that's where research jumps into the problem area. In fact, I was teaching a workshop with young professionals just this last week and this topic came up as a pretty solid roadblock for one of the writers. Of course, that writer was a full-time nonfiction writer and was carrying over the belief system into the fiction.

So let me repeat here clearly what I told that writer. If you have this myth issue, print this out as a big sign and put it over your computer.

IT'S FICTION!!

Yup, I shouted that. Fiction, by its very definition is made up. Duh.

So now comes the really ugly word that I had to look up to spell right: Verisimilitude: An appearance of being true.

That's the exact definition from my dear old Oxford American Dictionary.

So, in fiction, we writers make stuff up. I give my job description as a person who sits alone in a room and makes stuff up. But what I make up needs to have the appearance of being true, if not in detail, in character action and emotions. There is where the myth is true and not true.

In every story we need enough detail to make it feel right. That does not mean it has to be right, it just has to feel right."

I followed this advice and was able to move on in several points in my stories rather than overthinking it. Think of all the stories in books, movies and television that would have never seen the light of day if the story teller has to be too literal or perfect with everything.