Page:Treatise on poisons in relation to medical jurisprudence, physiology, and the practice of physic (IA treatiseonpoison00chriuoft).pdf/511

 and covered with numberless particles of glass of various sizes, some of which simply touched, while others lacerated it; and no other morbid appearance could be detected in the body. The other case is described by Portal. A man undertook for a wager to eat his wine-glass, and actually swallowed a part of it. But he was attacked with acute pain in the stomach, and subsequently with convulsions. Portal made him eat a surfeit of cabbage; and having thus enveloped the fragments, administered an emetic, which brought away the glass and vegetables together. The same feat has undoubtedly been sometimes accomplished with impunity. For example, in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, an instance is related of a man who champed and swallowed three-fourths of a drinking-glass without suffering any harm; and the person mentioned by Osiander swallowed many pieces of glass, and sustained no inconvenience (p. 503). But these facts will not altogether outweigh the equally pointed narratives of Portal and Mr. Hebb. And, on the whole, the medical jurist must come to the conclusion, that broken and pounded glass, though generally harmless, may sometimes prove injurious or even fatal. Powdered glass, however, is probably inert.

Another variety of injury from the mechanical irritants is inflammation from hot liquids, such as melted lead or boiling water. These, when swallowed, may unquestionably cause serious mischief, and even death; and the symptoms they induce are exactly those of the irritant poisons properly so called.

The effects of boiling water have been investigated experimentally by Dr. Bretonneau of Tours; and the results illustrate forcibly the observations which have been repeatedly made in the course of this work, respecting the slight constitutional derangement caused by such poisons as have merely a local irritating power. He found that when boiling water was injected in the quantity of eight ounces into the stomach of dogs, it excited inflammation, passing on to gangrene, both in the villous and muscular coats. The symptoms, however, were trifling. For a day or two the animals appeared languid; but in three days they generally became lively and playful, one of them actually lined a bitch, and it was only on strangling them and examining the bodies, that the extent of the mischief was discovered.

I am not aware that any such case have hitherto occurred in man. Death from drinking boiling water, indeed, is not an uncommon accident, particularly in Ireland and some parts of England, where children, who are in the habit of drinking cold water from the tea-kettle, have swallowed boiling water by mistake. It appears, however, that in these instances death is not owing to inflammation of the gullet and stomach, but to inflammation of the upper part of the windpipe,—the water never passing lower than the pharynx. The best information on this subject is contained in an interesting paper