Page:Treatise on poisons in relation to medical jurisprudence, physiology, and the practice of physic (IA treatiseonpoison00chriuoft).pdf/66

 poisoning it has been several times alluded to as unsound; and repeated opportunities of establishing exceptions will occur in the course of this work, under the head of individual poisons. At present it may be well to illustrate its unsoundness in reference to those charges of poisoning, where no particular poison is pointed at by the medical evidence, but where a whole class of poisons must be kept more or less in view. Even here I apprehend there may be sufficient evidence in the symptoms and morbid appearances, without any chemical facts,—to render poisoning so highly probable, that in conjunction with strong moral evidence, no sensible man can entertain any doubt on the subject. Several illustrations might be here given; and some will be found scattered throughout the work. In the present place a few instances will be mentioned which cannot be conveniently arranged any where else, and which are well worthy of notice, as being striking examples of the decision of questions of poisoning without chemical evidence.

A man of doubtful character and morals, well acquainted with chemistry and medical jurisprudence, and of disordered finances, was known to harbour a design on a friend's wife, who possessed a considerable fortune. At last he one morning invited the husband to breakfast with him at a tavern; and they breakfasted, in a private apartment, on beef-steaks, fried potatoes, eels, claret, and rum. They had scarcely commenced the meal when his guest complained of feeling unwell; and soon afterwards he vomited violently. This symptom continued, along with excruciating pain in the belly, for a long time before the prisoner sent for medical aid; indeed he did not procure a physician till the sufferer had been also attacked with very frequent and involuntary purging. The physician, who, before seeing his patient, had received the prisoner's explanation of the apparent cause of the illness, was led at first to impute the whole to cholera caught by exposure to cold; but on returning at seven in the evening, and finding the gentleman had been dead for an hour, he at once exclaimed that he had been poisoned. On the body being inspected much external lividity was found, contraction of the fingers, and great inflammation of the stomach and intestines, presenting an appearance like that of gangrene. On analyzing some fluid left in the stomach, no arsenic or other poison could be detected. The attention of the inspectors was turned specially to arsenic, because the prisoner was proved to have bought that poison, and to have made a solution of some white powder in his kitchen not long before the deceased died. The prisoner in his defence stated, that the deceased had been for some time much weakened by the use of mercury, and while in this state was seized with cholera; and he likewise attempted to make it probable that the man, in despair at his not recovering from a venereal disease, might have committed suicide. The council of physicians who were required to give their opinion on the case state on the contrary, that the diseased was a healthy man, without any apparent disposition to disease; that there