pupils; and death followed not long afterwards.[1] This substance, before its real nature was known, used at one time to be employed in some parts of England as a variety of arsenic for poisoning rats.
The salts of baryta are absorbed in the course of their action. The chloride has been detected by Dr. Kramer both in the blood and urine by incineration with carbonate of potash, washing the ashes with weak solution of carbonate of potash, dissolving the residue in diluted nitric acid, and testing the solution for baryta.[2] Orfila has also obtained baryta, by his process alluded to above, in the liver, kidneys, and spleen of animals killed by the chloride.[3]
The symptoms produced by the salts of baryta in man have seldom been particularly described. An instance is shortly noticed in the Journal of Science, where an ounce of the hydrochlorate was taken by mistake for Glauber's salt, and proved fatal. The patient immediately after swallowing it felt a sense of burning in the stomach; vomiting, convulsions, headache, and deafness ensued; and death took place within an hour.[4] A similar case, fatal in two hours, has been related by Dr. Wach of Merseburg. A middle-aged woman who, though generally in good health, had suffered for a day or two from pains in the stomach, took one morning a solution of half an ounce of chloride of barium by mistake for sulphate of soda. She was soon seized with sickness, retching, convulsive twitches of the hands and feet, vomiting of clear mucus, great anxiety, restlessness, and loss of voice; and she died under constant efforts to vomit, and violent convulsive movements, but with her faculties entire.[5]
Unpleasant effects have been observed from too large doses of the chloride administered medicinally. A case is mentioned in the Medical Commentaries of a gentleman who was directed to take a solution as a stomachic, but swallowed one evening by accident so much as seventy or eighty drops. He had soon after profuse purging without tormina, then vomiting, and half an hour after swallowing the salt excessive muscular debility, amounting to absolute paraplegia of the limbs. This state lasted about twenty-four hours, and then gradually went off.[6] I have known violent vomiting, gripes, and diarrhœa produced in like manner by a quantity not much exceeding the usual medicinal doses.
Dr. Wilson of London has lately described a distinct case of poisoning with the carbonate. The quantity taken was half a tea-cupful; but emetics were given, and operated before any symptoms showed themselves. In two hours the patient complained of dimness of sight, double vision, headache, tinnitus, and a sense of distension in the stomach, and subsequently of pains in the knees and cramps of the legs, with occasional vomiting and purging next day; for some days afterwards the head symptoms continued, though more mildly,
