and yet hardly any of the poison be found in the stomach after death. Thus in a case related by Mertzdorff of poisoning with sulphuric acid, where life was prolonged for twelve hours, he could detect by minute analysis only 4-1/2 grains of the acid in the contents and tissue of the stomach. But then the hole was surrounded by signs of vital reaction, and so was the spleen upon which the aperture opened.[1] Judging from what I have often seen in animals killed with oxalic acid, which is the most rapidly fatal of all corrosives, so that little time is allowed for vital action, and also several times in persons who had died quickly from the action of sulphuric acid, I believe no poison can dissolve the stomach, without such unequivocal signs of violent irritation of the undissolved parts of the villous coat, as will secure an attentive observer from the mistake of confounding with these appearances the effects of spontaneous erosion. Spontaneous erosion is very generally united with unusual whiteness of the stomach, and there is never any material vascularity.
Resting on the description now given of the spontaneous and poisonous varieties of corrosion, it is an easy matter to decide a controversy, which at the time it occurred made a great deal of noise, and upon which the opinions of toxicologists have been unnecessarily divided. It is the question regarding death by poison which occurred in the trial of Mr. Angus at Liverpool in 1808 for the murder of his housekeeper Miss Burns. The poison suspected was corrosive sublimate. The symptoms were those of irritation in the alimentary canal,—vomiting, purging, and pain. In the dead body there was not any particular redness either of the intestines or of the stomach. But on the fore part of the stomach an aperture was found between the size of a crown piece and the palm of the hand; it had a ragged, pulpy margin; and the dissolution of the inner coat extended two inches from it all round the hole. No mention is made of adhesion or coloration of the margin. This description, it will be remarked, answers exactly that given above of spontaneous gelatinized perforation; and the absence of the signs of vital action around the hole and in the rest of the stomach is incompatible with the effects of a strong corrosive poison, unless death had occurred very soon after it was swallowed. This, however, was out of the question; for then the poison would have been found in the stomach,—which it was not.[2]
The case of Angus is not the only instance in recent times of spontaneous perforation having given rise to an opinion by medical men in favour of poisoning, and consequently to a criminal trial. Six years afterwards a similar incident occurred in France. A young woman near Montargis having died of a short illness, and a large erosion having been found in the stomach after death, six practitioners, on a view of the parts, and without referring to the antecedent symptoms or attempting an analysis of the contents of the stomach, declared that she died of the effects of some corrosive poison. The husband and mother-in-law, against whom there does not appear to
