Page:Treatise on poisons in relation to medical jurisprudence, physiology, and the practice of physic (IA treatiseonpoison00chriuoft).pdf/263

 for dissolving zinc having contained arsenic. Mr. Brittan, a Dublin chemist, wishing to ascertain the effects of hydrogen on the body, proceeded to inhale 150 cubic inches of it. Immediately after the second inhalation, he was seized with confusion, faintness, giddiness and shivering, and passed a stool, as well as two ounces of bloody urine, but without any pain. Pain in the limbs followed, and in two hours frequent vomiting and dull pain in the stomach. The pulse at this time was 90, the skin cold, and the voice feeble. Ammonia, laudanum, and emollient clysters gave him little relief. During the subsequent night there was frequent vomiting and no urine; the face became copper-coloured, and the rest of the body greenish; there was tenderness of the epigastrium and hiccup; but he was free of fever. On the third day there was diarrhœa and still no urine; but the jaundice had disappeared. On the fourth the breath was ammoniacal, and somnolency had set in. On the fifth the skin became again deeply jaundiced, and the face was œdematous; no urine had yet been discharged, and the bladder, examined with the catheter, was found empty. On the evening of the seventh day he expired. On examination of the body, two pints of red serum were found in the pleural cavities; the lungs were sound, the heart pale and flaccid, the liver indigo-blue, the gall-bladder distended with bile, the kidneys also indigo-blue, the stomach empty, and its villous coat brittle, with here and there inflamed-like spots on it, the bladder empty, the brain bloodless, the cellular tissue generally anasarcous. Arsenic was detected in the pleural serum. By an approximate calculation it was supposed that the hydrogen this gentleman inhaled had contained the equivalent arsenic of twelve grains of the oxide.

It would appear that arsenic acts with great rapidity and force when respired in any form.

Poisoning through the lining membrane of the nostrils is a still rarer accident than that last mentioned. There is a distinct example of it in the German Ephemerides, which arose from an arsenical solution having been used by mistake as a lotion for a chronic discharge from the nostrils. The individual was attacked with a profuse discharge from the nostrils, and then with stupor approaching to coma. Weakness of sight and of memory continued after sensibility returned; and he died two years afterwards, death having been preceded for some time by convulsions.

Arsenic when applied to the sound skin of animals does not easily affect them. The experiments of Jaeger formerly noticed prove that no effect is produced, if the poison is simply placed in contact with the skin. Nay even when rubbed into it with fatty matters it does not operate with energy; for in that case, according to the experiments of Renault, it causes sometimes a pustular eruption, sometimes an eschar, but never any constitutional disorder. It is more ener-*