Page:Treatise on poisons in relation to medical jurisprudence, physiology, and the practice of physic (IA treatiseonpoison00chriuoft).pdf/362

 1,500,000th and never exceeding a 120,000th part, may be detected not only in all vegetable substances, but likewise in the blood, as well as other fluids and solids of the animal body. Among vegetable substances he examined with great care cinchona-bark, madder, coffee, wheat and flour; and he succeeded in separating metallic copper from them all.

The accuracy of these researches was called in question. By some chemists the discoveries of Meissner and Sarzeau were confirmed so far as they relate to vegetable substances. By others the confirmation was extended to the animal body, and more especially to the human organs and secretions. Thus M. Devergie says, that, having been struck with the singular circumstance of two cases occurring to him in a single year, where analysis indicated copper in the tissues of the alimentary canal of persons suspected of having died of poison, he was led to inquire, along with M. O. Henry, whether the metal was contained naturally in the textures of the human body; and that in the course of many experiments, although unable to detect any in a solution made by means of weak acetic acid, he could always find it by the process of incineration. Orfila has also repeatedly detected traces of copper in the bodies of animals not poisoned with the preparations of that metal.

By other experimentalists opposite results have been obtained, more especially in regard to animal solids and fluids. In the course of an inquiry relative to the question, whether poisons pass into the blood, I failed to detect copper in the blood, muscles, or spinal marrow of animals, although the method of analysis must have enabled me to discover extremely minute quantities of that metal. Afterwards M. Chevreul was unable to detect the slightest trace of copper in beef, veal, or mutton; nor was he more successful in the case of wheat, provided care was taken to keep the sample clean. And more recently MM. Flandin and Danger have denied that there is any copper ever found naturally in the body.

These discrepant results appear to be in a great measure reconciled in an extensive inquiry into the subject by M. Boutigny; who found that wheat, wine, cider, and some other substances of a vegetable nature, do frequently present minute traces of copper, but only when copper is contained in the manure used in raising the grain, apples, and the like; that manure from the streets of great towns always contains copper, and introduces it into vegetable articles grown where such manure is used; and that the occasional presence of the same metal in animal substances may be traced either to copper vessels having been employed in preparing or preserving them, or to the animals producing them having been fed on vegetables presenting from the causes mentioned above a faint cupreous im-*