- lowing with impunity small quantities of the concentrated acids, has
related the case of a woman at Paris, who, after passing successively from wine to brandy and from that to alcohol, at last found nothing could titillate her stomach except aqua-fortis, of which she was seen to partake by several druggists of veracity.[1] The fire-eating mountebanks too are said to acquire the same power of endurance; but much of their apparent capability is really legerdemain. On the other hand, a very extraordinary sensibility to the action of the diluted mineral acids has been supposed to exist in the case of infants at the breast,—so great a sensibility, that serious symptoms and even death itself have been ascribed to the nurse's milk becoming impregnated with sulphuric acid, in consequence of her having taken it in medicinal doses. By two writers in the London Medical Repository griping pains, tremors and spasms have been imputed to this cause;[2] and a writer in the Medical Gazette says he has seen continued griping, green diarrhœa and fatal marasmus ensue,—apparently, he thinks, from ulceration of the gastro-intestinal mucous membrane.[3] Without questioning the great delicacy and tenderness of that membrane in infants, I must nevertheless express my doubts whether so small a quantity taken by a nurse, amounting in the cases in question only to four or six drops a day, could really produce fatal or even severe effects on her child.
Sulphuric acid is not less deadly when admitted into the body through other channels besides the mouth. Thus, it may prove fatal when introduced into the rectum. A woman at Bruges in Belgium had an injection administered, in which, being prepared hastily in the middle of the night, sulphuric acid had been substituted by mistake for linseed-oil. The patient immediately uttered piercing cries, and passed the remainder of the night in excessive torture. In the morning the bed-clothes were found corroded, and a portion of intestine had apparently come away; and she expired not long afterwards.[4]
Death may also be occasioned by the introduction of this acid into the ear. Dr. Morrison relates a case of the kind, where nitric acid, which is analogous in action, was poured by a man into his wife's ear, while she lay insensible from intoxication. She awoke in great pain, which continued for two or three days. In six days an eschar detached itself from the external passage of the ear; and this was followed by profuse hemorrhage, which recurred daily more or less for a month. On the day after the eschar came away, and without any precursory symptom referrible to the head, she was attacked with complete palsy of the right arm, and in eight days more with tremors and incomplete palsy of the rest of that side of the body. These symptoms subsequently abated; but they again increased after an imprudent exertion, and she died in a state of exhaustion seven weeks after the injury. The whole petrous portion of the temporal
