Arsenic and arsenical domestic poisoning / by Jabez Hogg.

  • Jabez Hogg
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Arsenic and arsenical domestic poisoning / by Jabez Hogg. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    arsenic may once more become the fashionable remedy it was in our forefathers’ days, and again find favour as a ((Tasteless Ague-drop.” In intermittent neuralgia and gastrodynia, arsenic acts as a nervine, or, more properly, a nervine tonic, for it soothes pain, promotes assimilation and secretion, and improves the appetite. In some instances it excites both the nervous and muscular functions of the stomach, and thereby digestion is materially invigorated. In intermit- tent neuralgia, nerve debility, it is beneficial. It is, nevertheless, an agent quite foreign to the blood, and if no attempt be made to eliminate it from the circulation, it becomes a poisonous irritant, and by a rough and ready method of its own, works its way out of the body. If, therefore, it is not carefully watched, it produces nerve disturbances, inflammation of the skin—dermititis, headache, giddiness, lassitude, shifting pains, and impaired sensibility of the extremities. That it exerts a specific action over the heart and other vital organs, as the lungs and salivary glands, evinced by the local pains, the irritative cough, and the occasional ptyalism is very well known. Dr. Darwin, the father of the present eminent philoso- pher, was probably the first to notice the specific action of arsenic over the nervous system and heart. He adminis- tered a saturated solution of arsenious acid in a case of heart disease with surprising effect. Full doses of the more soluble preparations of arsenic produce retardation of the heart’s action, an effect said to be due to para- lysis of the motor ganglia, or rather to a limiting action of the remedy, which renders the muscular tissue of the heart less irritable. From nerve disturbance and inter- ruption of nutrition, we have certain cutaneous diseases, termed generally by Dr. G. Kichgassen arseniqSm; by
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