Food poisoning / by Edwin Oakes Jordan.

  • Edwin O. Jordan
Date:
[1917]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Food poisoning / by Edwin Oakes Jordan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    37/132 page 25
    including the famous Japanese Fugu, which has many hundred deaths scored against it and has been often used to effect suicide. Poisonous varieties of fish seem more abundant in tropical waters than in temperate, but this is possibly because of the more general and indiscriminate use of fish as food in such localities as the Japanese and South Sea Islands. It is known that some cool-water fish are poisonous. The flesh of the Greenland shark possesses poisonous qualities for dogs and produces a kind of intoxication in these animals.1 Much uncertainty exists respecting the conditions under which the various forms of fish poisoning occur. One type is believed to be associated with the spawning season, and to be caused by a poison present in the reproductive tissues. The roe of the European barbel is said to cause frequent poisoning, not usually of a serious sort. The flesh or roe of the sturgeon, pike, and other fish is also stated to be poisonous during the spawning season. Some fish are said to be poisonous only when they have fed on certain marine plants.2 There is little definite knowledge about the poisons concerned. They are certainly not uniform in nature. The Fugu poison produces cholera-like symptoms, con¬ vulsions, and paralysis. It is not destroyed by boiling. The effect of the Greenland shark flesh on dogs is described as being Mike alcohol.” It is said that dogs fed with gradually increasing amounts of the poisonous shark’s flesh become to some degree immune. Different symptoms are described in other fish poisoning cases.3 1 A. H. Clark, Science, XLI (1915), 795. 2 See W. M. Kerr, U.S. Nav., Monthly Bull., VI (1912), 401. 3 Ibid.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3