the blood are derived from the discovery of the metal in the bodies of persons who had undergone a long mercurial course recently before death. In the German-Ephemerides it is said that no less than a pound of it was found in the brain and two ounces in the skull-cap of one who had been long salivated.[1] This is certainly too marvellous a story. But analogous observations have been made lately. In Hufeland's Journal it is mentioned that a skull found in a churchyard contained running quicksilver in the texture of its bones, and that there is preserved in the Lubben cabinet of midwifery a pelvis infiltered with mercury, and taken from a young woman who died of syphilis.[2] An unequivocal fact of the same nature has been related by Mr. Rigby Brodbelt. In a body of which he could not learn the history he found mercurial globules as big as a pin-head lying on the os hyoides, laryngeal cartilages, frontal bone, sternum, and tibia.[3] Another equally unquestionable fact of the kind has been supplied by Dr. Otto. On scraping the periosteum of several of the bones of a man who had laboured under syphilis, he remarked minute globules issuing from the osseous substance: in some places globules were deposited between the bone and periosteum, where the latter had been detached in the progress of putrefaction; and in other places, when the bones were struck, a shower of fine globules fell from them.[4] Wibmer observes that Fricke, surgeon to the Hamburg Infirmary, has obtained mercury by boiling the bones of persons who had been long under a course of mercurial inunction.[5]
The third and most satisfactory class of facts are the result of actual chemical analysis. These results were long variable. On the one hand, Mayer, Marabelli,[6] and Devergie,[7] failed to detect mercury in the fluids of people under a mercurial course; and I myself,[8] as well as Dr. Samuel Wright,[9] had no better success in some experiments on animals. On the other hand, Zeller detected it after death in the blood and bile, Cantu procured it from the urine, Buchner found it in the blood, saliva, and urine, and Schubarth extracted it from the blood. The first experimentalist found that in the blood and bile of animals killed by mercurial inunction, mercury could be detected by destructive distillation, but not by any fluid tests.[10] Cantu, by operating on sixty pounds of urine, taken from persons under the action of mercury, procured no less than twenty grains of the metal from the sediment.[11] The experiments of Buchner are very satisfactory. By destructive distillation of the crassamentum of seven ounces of blood taken from a patient who was salivated by mercury, he ob-*
- ↑ Dec. I. Ann. i. Obs. 8.
- ↑ Journ. der Prakt. Heilkunde, li. 5, p. 117.
- ↑ Mem. of Lond. Med. Soc. v. 112.
- ↑ Seltene Beobachtungen zur Anat. Physiol. und Pathol. Berlin, 1824, ii. 36. Quoted by Marx, die Lehre von den Giften, I. ii. 163.
- ↑ Die Wirkung der Arzneimittel und Gifte, iii. 86.
- ↑ Zeller, in Reil's Archiv. viii. 233.
- ↑ Nouvelle Bibliothêque Médicale, 1828, iv. 17 and 18.
- ↑ See the last Edition of this work, p. 366.
- ↑ See my Dispensatory, 1842, p. 507.
- ↑ Reil's Archiv, viii. 228.
- ↑ Journal der Praktischen Heilkunde, lx. 115.
