Hmm, Smells Like... Chloroform!

A few weeks ago I was talking to someone about the old Tintin comics, and how Tintin seemed to be knocked out with chloroform at least once in every book. Lo and behold, a report has been published in a medical journal concerning Tintin's regular "significant loss of conciousness" (not just restricted to chloroform but involving concussion from explosions, blows to the head and so on). The researcher suggests that a disorder of the pituitary gland resulting from the repeated head trauma may have caused his never aging youthfulness over the 50 or so years that the series ran.

Classic quote:

"We identified the cause of the trauma, the length of loss of consciousness (calculated by the number of cartoon frames before Tintin returns to normal activity) and the apparent severity of the trauma (indicated by the number of objects e.g., stars, candles revolving above Tintin's head)," he said.

I bet something similar was going on with Tintin's dog Snowy, who not only had more than a few run ins with the old chloroform, but also seemed to end up getting blind drunk fairly often.