Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/691

Rh having their heads rubbed with a tobacco ointment. Cases are recorded of smugglers who died after having covered the bare skin of their whole body with tobacco leaves which they were trying to introduce fraudulently. Ferdinand Martin has related the case of a lady afflicted with lumbago who applied flannels dipped in a decoction of smoking tobacco to the ailing part. Her pains were promptly subdued, but she soon felt all the phenomena of intoxication by nicotine, and did not recover from it for three days. Poisoning by tobacco generally occurs by accident or mistake. It is rarely tried criminally, probably because the toxic properties of the drug are not reliable enough. Assassins prefer the alkaloid itself, the effects of which are much more prompt and more terrible than those of the plant. By whatever method it is administered in experiments, the animal is slain. Two drops are enough to kill a large dog; eight drops will kill a horse in four minutes. Under its effects he rages, prances, writhes, falls down, and dies in convulsions. "This alkaloid," says Claude Bernard, "is one of the most virulent poisons known, and a few drops of it on the cornea of an animal will kill it instantly. Nicotine, apparently sympathetic in its effects, in its action is very much like prussic acid." The action of this principle is so subtle that it can not be analyzed unless the drug is administered in minute doses and very dilute solutions. There is then observed the phenomenon—which goes far to explain the facility with which one is habituated to the use of tobacco—of the rapid development of tolerance of gradually increasing doses. This has been demonstrated by Traube, who, with the twenty-fourth of a drop of nicotine subcutaneously injected, obtained very marked effects on the first day. The next day, on the same animal, it took a whole drop to reach the same result, and at the end of four days five drops were necessary. A similar tolerance is observed in man for hypodermic injections of morphine; but one does not get accustomed to digitaline or strychnine.

When nicotine is administered in doses weak enough to permit an analysis of its effects, almost the same phenomena are witnessed as with the whole plant. In the cases of poisoning already mentioned, there came on at the beginning extreme anguish and agitation, with sensations of burning heat in the pit of the stomach. Respiration was accelerated and the pulse was slackened; then came vomiting and purging, vertigo, and faintness. The face grew pale, the skin was covered with a cold sweat, the head was confused, and the patient fell into a deep stupor, with cries, general trembling, and convulsions. This agitation gives place