Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 15.djvu/15

 AN

EXPERIMENTAL INQUIRY

INTO THE

EFFECTS OF HYDROCYANIC ACID,

PRODUCED UPON

ANIMAL LIFE.

BY THOMAS NUNNELEY, ESQ., F.R.C.S.E.,

Surgeon to the Leeds Eye and Ear Infirmary, and Lecturer on Anatomy in the Leeds School of Medicine.

Though the deadly effects of hydrocyanic acid upon animal life have been for so many years known to the profession, and the facility with which it may be used as an instrument of destruction by the suicide or murderer fully recognized, it is only within a comparatively recent period that the public have become sufficiently familiar with its properties to choose it as a means of death in preference to the other methods of getting rid of life. The knowledge, however, which had been gradually, but surely, becoming widely distributed, has within the last two years, in consequence of the great publicity and notoriety given by the journals and newspapers to two or three trials where the acid had been the cause of death, (particularly those of Belany and Tawell,) been so forced upon every person, that a sort of popularity has been given to hydrocyanic acid; and for the future, or, at least, for some time to come, we may expect to meet with many cases in which it has been used. It appears, indeed, by no means improbable that it may as frequently be employed as arsenic and other mineral preparations, and it becomes, therefore, of the utmost importance to determine the precise effects of it upon animal life; whether these VOL. XV.