property of enabling the bodies of men and animals poisoned with it both to resist decay unusually long, and to decay in an unusual manner. The observations and inquiries which have been made abroad on this subject were little known any where else than in Germany before the publication of the earlier editions of the present work; but parallel examples have been since met with both in Britain and France; and in this country the importance of the subject is generally appreciated.
The first occasion on which the antiseptic property of arsenic was brought under public notice was about the beginning of the present century, in the course of the trial of the widow of a certain state-councillor, Ursinus of Berlin. Some time before that Dr. Welper, then medical inspector in the Prussian capital, having remarked that the body of a person poisoned with arsenic remained quite fresh for a whole week in summer, he attended carefully to the subject at every opportunity, and invariably, he says, found that the body resisted putrefaction. Not long after making this remark, he was concerned in 1803, by virtue of his office, in the investigations in the case of the widow Ursinus. This lady having been discovered in an attempt to poison her servant, suspicions arose regarding the previous sudden death of three persons in her family, her husband, a young officer who had carried on an amour with her, and an aunt from whom she derived an inheritance. They had all died in mysterious circumstances, and the lady had been their only nurse. Dr. Welper disinterred the bodies of the husband and aunt, which had been buried, the former two years and a half before at Berlin, the latter half a year afterwards at Charlottenberg; and he found them not putrid, but dried up; and specks of an appearance, which is described as being gangrene, but which was probably warty extravasation, were visible in the stomach. Arsenic could not be detected.
He afterwards got Dr. Klanck, his acquaintance, to make some express experiments on animals; and the results were strikingly conformable. In dogs poisoned with arsenic and left for two months sometimes buried in a damp cellar, sometimes exposed to the air of the cellar, the flesh and alimentary canal were red and fresh, as if pickled; and though the place where the carcases were subsequently buried again was flooded for eight months after, the intestines were eventually found entire and red, the fat converted into adipocire, and most of the muscles unaltered,—those only being soft and greasy which were directly acted on by the water. From a set of comparative experiments which were made on dogs killed by blows, or poisoned by corrosive sublimate, or by opium, Klanck found, that, after being buried in the same place, and for the same space of time the whole soft parts of the carcases were converted into a greasy mass. In a subsequent year he repeated his experiments, the bodies, however, being this time left exposed to the air of the cellar. The experiments were commenced in the month of August. In ten days there appeared slight signs of incipient putrefaction; a faint putrid smell was exhaled, and all flies that settled on the carcase died.
