Page:Treatise on poisons in relation to medical jurisprudence, physiology, and the practice of physic (IA treatiseonpoison00chriuoft).pdf/502

 of gastro-enteric inflammation. In the most severe of Hünefeld's cases the quantity taken did not exceed four ounces, and was sometimes only an ounce.

The same author found that a drachm and a half of the caseïc acid, which he procured from the cheese, killed a cat in eight minutes, and the same quantity of the sebacic acid another in three hours. His experiments, however, are not quite conclusive of the fact that these acids are really the poisonous principles, as he has not extended his experimental researches to the caseïc and sebacic acids prepared in the ordinary way. His views will probably be altered and simplified, if future experiments should confirm the late inquiries of Braconnot, who has stated that Proust's caseïc acid is a modification of the acetic, combined with an acrid oil. Westrumb procured analogous results with those of Hünefeld when he gave to animals the acid fat which he separated in the course of his analysis.

The poisonous cheese has been hitherto met with chiefly in some parts of Germany. From information communicated to me by Dr. Swanwick of Macclesfield, there is some reason to think that a parallel poison is occasionally met with in Cheshire, among the small hill-farms, where the limited extent of the dairies obliges the farmer to keep the curd for several days before a sufficient quantity is accumulated for the larger cheeses.—I am indebted to Mr. Wilson of Lockerby for the particulars of a set of cases, which seem to have been owing to some obscure poison in cheese. A gentleman, an hour after eating the suspected cheese, was seized with extreme weakness and severe vomiting for four hours, then with general soreness and a mercurial taste in the mouth, and afterwards with tenesmus, bloody stools, soreness of the gums, and cramps in the limbs; from which symptoms he did not recover for four weeks. Five other members of his household suffered similarly, but less severely, and also the shop-boy who ate a little while selling it. None of the ordinary mineral poisons could be detected in it.—It is hardly necessary to add, that analogous properties may be imparted to cheese by the intentional or accidental addition of other poisons of a mineral nature. This subject has been already alluded to in the section upon lead.

As connected, though indeed but remotely, with the cheese-poison, some notice may be here taken of a peculiar mode in which it has been supposed that milk may acquire the properties of an acrid poison. It has been several times remarked on the continent, that the milk even of the cow, but more particularly that of the ewe and goat, may act like a violent poison, although no mineral or other deleterious impregnation could be detected in it; and these effects have been variously and vaguely ascribed to the animal having been diseased, or to its having fed on acrid vegetables, which pass into the milk without injury to its health, because though poisonous to most animals, they are not so to the Ruminantia. This singular topic cannot be thoroughly investigated, as precise facts are still wanting. But the two following examples of the accident alluded to may be