Page:Treatise on poisons in relation to medical jurisprudence, physiology, and the practice of physic (IA treatiseonpoison00chriuoft).pdf/499

 gradually fails, frequent swoonings ensue, and the skin becomes cold and insensible. The secretions and excretions, with the exception of the urine, are then commonly suspended; but sometimes profuse diarrhœa continues throughout. The appetite is not impaired; fever is rarely present; and the mind continues to the last unclouded. Fatal cases end with convulsions and oppressed breathing between the third and eighth day. In cases of recovery the period of convalescence may be protracted to several years. The chief appearances in the dead body are signs of inflammation in the mucous membrane of the alimentary canal,—such as whiteness and dryness of the throat, thickening of the gullet, redness of the stomach and intestines; also croupy deposition in the windpipe; great flaccidity of the heart; and a tendency in the whole body to resist putrefaction. In a set of cases which occurred so lately as 1841, there was found after death abscesses in the tonsils, dark bluish redness of the membrane of the pharynx, windpipe and bronchial ramifications, gorging of the pulmonary air-tubes and condensation of the pulmonary tissue itself, dark redness of the fundus of the stomach, with circumscribed softening, a dark gray, red, or black appearance of the mucous coat of the intestines, accumulation of greenish-yellow fæces in the colon, brittleness of the liver, and enlargement of the spleen.

The article which is apt to occasion these baneful effects is of two sorts, the white and the bloody sausage (leberwürste, blut-würste). Both are of large size, the material being put into swine's stomachs; and they are cured by drying and smoking them in a chimney with wood-smoke. Those which have been found to act as poisons possess an acid reaction, are soft in consistence, have a nauseous, putrid taste, and an unpleasant sweetish-sour smell, like that of purulent matter. They are met with principally about the beginning of spring, when they are liable to be often alternately frozen and thawed in the curing. Those sausages only become poisonous which have been boiled before being salted and hung up. They are poisonous only at a particular stage of decay, and cease to be so when putrefaction has advanced so far that sulphuretted-hydrogen is evolved. The central part is often poisonous when the surface is wholesome.

Various opinions have been entertained of the cause of the deleterious qualities thus contracted. In recent times the principle has been supposed to be pyroligneous acetic acid, hydrocyanic acid, or cocculus indicus. Dr. Kerner, however, has shown that none of these notions will account for the phenomena; and at first conceived he had proved the poisonous principle to be a fatty acid analogous to the sebacic acid of Thenard, and originating in a modified process of putrefaction. From the poisonous sausage he procured by double decomposition an acid similar in chemical properties to that obtained from fat by destructive distillation; and by experiments on animals he thought he observed, that the acid procured in either way produced symptoms analogous to those of poisoning with the deleterious sausage. Subsequently, however, he changed his views in some