Page:Treatise on poisons in relation to medical jurisprudence, physiology, and the practice of physic (IA treatiseonpoison00chriuoft).pdf/734

 and had a frequent pulse, and dilated sluggish pupils; in which state he continued three weeks later when the account was published. The following case, related by Dr. Chowne, also seems to belong to the same category, although it presents anomalies. A boy, eight years of age, soon after swallowing about eight ounces of gin, said he felt like a drunk man, and suddenly became motionless and insensible. In no long time he vomited a fluid of the odour of gin; and in seven hours from the commencement a fluid was withdrawn from the stomach, possessing no longer any such odour. He was now motionless, insensible, pale, and cold; the pupils were contracted, the pulse feeble and hurried, the breathing stertorous and slow; and he made ineffectual efforts to vomit. Stimulants of all kind had little effect on him for a day and a half, when the breathing became more natural, and his look quite intelligent. Yet he could not answer questions, exhibited no sign of volition, and had a pulse so frequent as 160. In twenty-four hours more the breathing became laborious and rattling, and the lips livid; and death took place near the close of the third day. The only appearances of any note in the dead body were general injection of the arachnoid membrane of the brain, and effusion of frothy mucus into the bronchial ramifications. Similar to these is the following extraordinary case which has been communicated to me by Dr. Traill. A boy seven years of age, who was persuaded by two miscreants to take nearly five ounces of undiluted whisky, suffered for two days from the ordinary symptoms of excessive intoxication, which were then immediately followed by epileptic convulsions. These continued to recur with more or less violence, but always frequently, for two months down to the date of the judicial investigation to which the case gave rise. All these forms of the effects of drinking ardent spirits can scarcely be considered as simple poisoning, but as the result of poisoning developing a tendency to diseases of the head.

The third variety of poisoning with spirits in the second degree proves fatal, not in itself, but by some trivial accident happening, from which the individual cannot escape on account of his powerless insensibility. Thus, it is no uncommon thing for persons in a state of deep intoxication to fall down in an exposed place, where they perish from cold, or to tumble with the face in a puddle, and so be suffocated, or to be choked by inhaling the contents of the stomach imperfectly vomited, or by lying in such a posture that their neck-*cloth produces strangulation. These statements are so familiar, that it is unnecessary to illustrate them by special facts. The reader's attention was called to such accidents in the previous editions of this work. Two well-marked cases of the kind have been since published by Mr. Skae.

In cases of simple poisoning in the second degree the progress of the symptoms is on the whole remarkably uniform, gradual and uninterrupted. But there are likewise some anomalies which it