The opponents and supporters of chloroform were mainly at odds with the question of whether the complications were solely due to respiratory disturbance or whether chloroform had a specific effect on the heart. Between 1864 and 1910 numerous commissions in Britain studied chloroform, but failed to come to any clear conclusions. It was only in 1911 that Levy proved in experiments with animals that chloroform can cause cardiac fibrillation. The reservations about chloroform could not halt its soaring popularity. Between about 1865 and 1920, chloroform was used in 80 to 95% of all narcoses performed in the UK and the German-speaking countries. In America, however, there was less enthusiasm for chloroform narcosis. In Germany, the first comprehensive surveys of the fatality rate during anesthesia were made by Gurlt between 1890 and 1897. In 1934, Killian gathered all the statistics compiled until then and found that the chances of suffering fatal complications under ether were between 1:14,000 and 1:28,000, whereas under chloroform the chances were between 1:3,000 and 1:6,000. The rise of gas anesthesia using nitrous oxide, improved equipment for administering anesthetics and the discovery of hexobarbital in 1932 led to the gradual decline of chloroform narcosis.