Page:Treatise on poisons in relation to medical jurisprudence, physiology, and the practice of physic (IA treatiseonpoison00chriuoft).pdf/162

 *ture at once, and suffered only from attempts to cough, some retching and much thirst.

It further appears that in medicinal doses, such as a quarter of a grain, frequently repeated, it is a dangerous poison, unless its effects are carefully watched. For in consequence of accumulation in the system, or gradually increasing action, it produces when long used some very singular and hazardous symptoms; and like mercury, foxglove, and some other poisons, it may be taken long without effect, and at length begin to operate suddenly. The symptoms which it then occasions are sometimes those of irritation; namely, incessant vomiting and purging, acute pain in the stomach, loaded tongue, rapid and extreme emaciation, violent cramps and small frequent pulse. These symptoms may continue many days, and even when subdued to a certain extent, vomiting and cramps are apt to recur for months after. A fatal case of this form of affection has been related by M. Zink, a Swiss physician. His patient, after taking too large doses of iodine for about a month, was seized with restlessness, burning heat of skin, tremors, palpitation, syncope, excessive thirst, a sense of burning along the gullet, frequent purging of bilious and black stools, priapism, and tremulous pulse. The symptoms of local inflammation went off in a few days; but those of general fever continued; and he died after six weeks' illness. Another fatal case has been described in Rust's Journal. The leading symptoms were pain in the region of the liver, loss of appetite, emaciation, quartan fever, diarrhœa, excessive weakness; and after the emaciation was far advanced a hardened liver could be felt. The patient appears to have died of exhaustion. From this case, and another of which the appearances after death will be presently noticed, it is not improbable that iodine possesses the power of inflaming the liver.

In another and more common affection, the patient is attacked with tremors, at first slight and confined to the fingers, afterwards violent and extending to the whole muscles of the arms and even of the trunk. At the same time there is excessive and rapidly increasing weakness, a sense of anxiety and sinking, a total suspension of the function of digestion, rapid and extreme muscular emaciation, tendency to fainting, and violent continued palpitation, accompanied sometimes with absorption of the testicles in man, and of the mammæ in females. In the midst of these phenomena the curative powers of the poison over the disease for which it has chiefly been used, namely, goître, are developed. It has been remarked in particular, that the diminution of the goître keeps pace with the diminution of the breasts, though at times either effect has been developed without the other. An instance is related in Rust's Journal of a female, whose breasts began to sink after she had used iodine for four months; and in four weeks hardly a vestige of them remained;