Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/814

Rh MEDICAL JURISPKUDENCE ventfve measures to be adopted in the use of food infested with parasites will alone be treated of in this place. (1) Poisonous Vegetables. Unsound or even rotten vegetables and fruits may be consumed, and become fertile sources of varied forms of poisoning, especially in hot summers. The symptoms produced by the ingestion of large quantities of unsound fruit or vegetables are of a diarrhceal character, not often of an alarming severity, except in the cases of the young and feeble. They may, however, sometimes attain a fatal severity. The cause is usually obvious, and the treatment is simple ; mild purgatives, as rhubarb or castor oil, with or followed by opiates, to remove peccant matters from the intestines ;, and stimulants, as ammonia or alcohol, if there be much collapse. Certain fungi or mushrooms are known to be specifically poisonous, such as the Amanita muscaria, or fly-fungus, and others. Certain kinds of mushrooms, usually innocuous, are occasionally poisonous or deleterious ; and the cause of this is not always clear. Poisonous fungi produce narcotic and irritant symptoms. (2) Poisonous, Tainted, or Putrid Meat. The obvious char acteristics of good sound flesh meat are that its colour is red neither pale pink nor deep purple ; that it is marbled in appearance ; firm and elastic to the touch, scarcely moistening the fingers ; having a slight and not unpleasant odour ; and that when exposed to the air for a day or two it should neither become dry on the surface nor wet and sodden. Sound meat is acid to litmus paper; unsound meat may be neutral or alkaline. Meat may be tainted with physic administered to the animal. It is a common practice, when a fat and valuable animal is unwell, to physic it, and if its recovery be not speedy to slaughter it. The meat of such animals may often be met with in our markets, and may induce illness from the physic with which it is contaminated. The effects of simple putridity are most varied. It is well known that some nations habitually eat putrid meat, and even prefer it to fresh ; and the development of rottenness in eggs for the epicure is an art in China. There is no doubt that habit has much to do with the tolerance by the stomach of putrid meat, whether cooked or un cooked. But tainted game, and indeed all kinds of meat in which putrefaction has commenced, may indubitably produce disease. This is chiefly of a diarrhceal character, preceded by rigors, and attended with collapse and, it may be, convulsions and other signs of a profound affection of the nervous system. The effects of such tainted meat are slight as compared with those which are produced by the sausage-poison, developed by a sort of modified putrefaction in certain German sausages. These sausages, when they become musty and soft in their interior, nauseous in odour and flavour, and strongly acid to testpaper, acquire a highly poisonous character, and are frequently fatal in their effects. The symptoms produced by the use of poisonous flesh are gastric pain, vomiting, diarrhoea, depression, coldness of the limbs, and weak irregular action of the heart. Fatal cases end in convulsions and oppressed respiration, death ensuing from the third to the eighth day. The nature of the sausage-poison, which is probably akin to that of putrid and indeed all non-specifically tainted meats, has been a matter of considerable controversy. Some have held that the poisonous action is due to the development of rancid fatty acids ; others believe that a so-called catalytic body is produced, capable of setting up by contact a similar catalytic action. Others have regarded the sausage-poison as due to the formation of pyrogeneous acids during the drying or smoking of the sausages. The recent discovery by Selmi of a class of poisonous alkaloids or amides, termed ptomaines, developed during putrefaction of animal matters, on the one hand, and the discovery by Ballard and Klein, still more recently, that the fatally poisonous properties of hams prepared according to the American method may be due to the presence of a parasitic bacillus, point to one or other of these two latter causes as that of the effects of sausage-poison. Others again have referred the effects to the presence of a microscopic fungus Sarcina botulina. The poisonous nature of the flesh of animals which have fed on certain plants for example, hares which have fed on certain species of rhododendron, pheasants on the kalmia shrub, &c. has been abundantly demonstrated, and need only be referred to here. The honey from bees which have garnered on poisonous plants, as the azalea, may likewise be deleterious ; and the fact is of classic interest. The milk even of goats which have browsed on poisonous herbs has also proved poisonous. (3) Diseased Meat. The poisonous effects of meat affected with nertain parasites trichinae, cysticerci, trematodes, &c., is an un doubted fact. Great quantities of meat pass through our markets vhich is undoubtedly the flesh of animals affected with disease, such as foot-and-mouth disease, pleuro-pneumonia, pig typhoid, the so-called scarlatina of swine, sheep-pox, &c. ; and the question is quite undecided as to whether such flesh produces any injurious effects. To stop the sale of such meat would be to cut off large sources of our meat supplies. The evils attending the use of such diseased meat, when well cooked, have undoubtedly been exagger ated ; but, on the other hand, there is enough evidence to show that the use of certain kinds of diseased meat may be followed by serious results. Thus it is generally admitted that the flesh of animals which have suffered from pleuro-pneumonia and murrain will give rise to boils and carbuncles. Braxy mutton may also produce disease when eaten. Trichinae will produce trichinosis, flukes, the tape-worm, &c. Hams are occasionally fatally poisonous ; and this has been traced to the presence of. certain low organisms known as bacilli. (4) Poisonous Fish. Fish is sometimes a poisonous article of food. Cases of poisoning by the so-called shell-fish of the British islands are not unfrequently met with. Generally it is the eating of crabs, lobsters, and mussels which produces such results. These are usually of a distressing rather than of a serious character, nettle-rash being a common symptom. Occasionally, however, fatal results have ensued from the use of mussels. In tropical seas poisonous fish are more plentiful the golden sardine, the bladder fish, the grey snapper, &c. ; and, these being eaten by larger fish, as the barracuda, perch, globe-fish, conger eel, &c., the latter may in turn become poisonous. Good cookery, that is, exposure to a sufficiently high temperature for a sufficiently lengthened time, is undoubtedly the best measure to adopt short of absolute destruction of unsound and diseased meat. So long as meat is high-priced, and the effects of diseased meat so little understood and so undefined, it will be impossible to induce medical officers of health and sanitary inspectors to seize all the diseased and unsound meat which is daily offered for sale. Notwithstanding all that has been said to the contraiy, experienced observers are pretty well agreed that thorough exposure of the meat throughout to the temperature at which albumen is coagulated is destructive to the parasites of flesh. Smoking is less effective. Salting is more effective than smoking ; but there is some evidence to show that salting may merely hold the life of organisms in suspense without entirely destroying their vitality ; and thus in the conversion of salted pork into hams a process of re-salting and subsequent drying the specific germ (a bacillus) has been known to be again rendered harmful. It is not known whether efficient cooking entirely removes the deleterious effects of flesh affected with other than parasitic disease, as for example pleuro-pneumonia. The curative measures for the results of eating poisonous food cannot be specifically described. They are those which must be arrived at on general principles. Symptoms are to be treated, and the powers of the patient sustained until the deleterious matter is removed by the ordinary channels, or the trichinae have become encysted. HISTORY OF FORENSIC MEDICUS T E. The true origin of medical jurisprudence is of comparatively recent date, although traces of its principles may be perceived in remote times. Among the ancient Greeks the principles of medical science appear only to have been applied to legislation in certain questions relating to legitimacy. In the writings of Galen we find, however, remarks on the differences between the fcetal and the adult lungs ; he also treats of the legitimacy of seven months children, and discusses feigned .diseases. Turning to Rome, we find that the laws of the Twelve Tables fix three hundred days as the extreme duration of utero-gestation. It is doubtful whether the Roman law authorized medical inspections of dead bodies. In the code of Justinian we find De Statu Hominum ; De Posnis et Manumissis ; De Sicariis ; De Inspiciendo Ventre Custodiendoque Partu ; De Muliere quae pcperit undccimo mense ; De Impotcntia ; De Her- maphroditis, titles which show obvious traces of a recognized connexion between medicine and law. It was not, however, by the testimony of living medical witnesses that such questions were to be settled, but on the authority of Hippocrates. Medical jurisprudence, as a science, dates only from the 16th cen tury. In 1507 the bishop of Bamberg introduced a penal code in which the necessity of medical evidence in certain cases was re cognized ; and in 1532 the emperor Charles V. persuaded the diet of Ratisbon to adopt an uniform code of German penal juris prudence, in which the civil magistrate was enjoined in all cases of doubt or difficulty to obtain the evidence of medical witnesses, as in cases of personal injuries, infanticide, pretended pregnancy, simulated diseases, and poisoning. The true dawn of forensic medicine dates, however, from the publication in 1553 of the Con- stitutio Criminalis Carolina, in Germany. A few years later Weiher, a physician, having undertaken to prove that witches and demoniacs are, in fact, persons subject to hypochondriasis and hysteria, and should not be punished, aroused popular indignation, and was with difficulty rescued from the flames by his patron, William duke of Cleves. At the close of the 16th century Ambrose Pare wrote on monsters, on simulated diseases, and on the art of drawing up medico-legal reports ; Pineau also published his treatise on virginity and defloration. About the same time as these stimuli to the study of forenrc medicine were being made known in Paris, the first system atic treatise on the science appeared in Sicily in the form of a treatise De Relationibus Mcdicorum by Fidele. Paulo Zacchia, the illustrious Roman medical jurist, moreover, published from 1621