Page:Treatise on poisons in relation to medical jurisprudence, physiology, and the practice of physic (IA treatiseonpoison00chriuoft).pdf/339

 period of time. The symptoms in both instances were those of severe irritation of the stomach, extensive inflammation of the organs in the mouth, and suppression of urine; and in Thibert's case a small quantity of albuminous fluid was discharged from the bladder instead of urine.

The protochloride or calomel, and probably also the protoxide, are the most manageable of the preparations of mercury for inducing ptyalism. Calomel is also an irritant; that is, it causes irritation and inflammation in the alimentary canal when swallowed. This part of its properties as a poison will require a word or two of explanation.

Calomel is universally employed as a laxative, but to secure this effect being produced it is commonly combined with other purgatives. When given alone a few grains will in some constitutions induce a violent hypercatharsis; and larger, but still moderate, doses have with most people such a tendency to cause severe griping and diarrhœa as to have led to the practice of combining it with opium when the object is to salivate. These considerations clearly establish that calomel, in a moderate dose of five or ten grains, is an irritant.

It farther appears that in larger doses it is said to have occasionally produced very violent effects, nay, even death itself, by its irritant operation. Hoffmann has mentioned two instances where fifteen grains of calomel proved fatal to boys between the ages of twelve and fifteen. One of them had vomiting, tremors of the hands and feet, restlessness and anxiety, and died on the sixth day. The other, he merely mentions, died after suffering from extreme anxiety and black vomiting. Another fatal case has been related by Ledelius in the German Ephemerides, which was caused by a dose of half an ounce taken accidentally. Vomiting soon ensued, and a sense of acridity in the throat; then profuse diarrhœa to the extent of twenty evacuations in the day; next excessive prostration of strength and torpor of the external senses; and death followed in little more than twenty-four hours. Wibmer quotes Vigetius, an author of the beginning of last century, for a similar case, likewise fatal, which was occasioned by half an ounce,—also Hellweg, a writer of the previous century, for the case of a physician, who took an ordinary medicinal dose by way of experiment, and died in five hours under all the symptoms of violent irritant poisoning.

These observations being kept in view, what explanation will the toxicologist give of the effects which in modern times have been ascribed to large doses of calomel? It was stated not many years ago by several East India surgeons, apparently with the universal assent of their brethren in later times, that this drug in the dose of a scruple administered even several times a day, is not only not an