Trichloroethylene is a good analgesic at 0.35 to 0.5% concentrations. Trichloroethylene was used in the treatment of trigeminal neuralgia beginning in 1916.
From the 1940s through the 1980s, both in Europe and North America, trichloroethylene was used as a volatile anesthetic almost invariably administered with nitrous oxide. Marketed in the UK by Imperial Chemical Industries under the trade name Trilene it was coloured blue (with a dye called waxoline blue in 1:200,000 concentration) to avoid confusion with the similar-smelling chloroform. Trilene was stabilised with 0.01% thymol.
TCE replaced earlier anesthetics chloroform and ether in the 1940s due to its lower toxicity than chloroform and being relatively non-flammable (unlike ether which is extremely flammable), but was itself replaced in the 1960s in developed countries with the introduction of halothane, which allowed much faster induction and recovery times and was considerably easier to administer. Trilene was also used as an inhaled analgesic, mainly during childbirth, often self-applied by the patient. Trichloroethylene was introduced for obstetrical anaesthesia in 1943, and used until the 1980s. Its anaesthetic use was banned in the United States in 1977 but the anaesthetic use in the United Kingdom remained until the late 1980s.
TCE was used with halothane in the tri-service field anaesthetic apparatus used by the UK armed forces under field conditions. As of 2000, TCE was still in use as an anesthetic in Africa.
Trichloroethylene has been used in the production of halothane.