- some were singing,—some praying,—others lying listless and insensible.
Many of them retched and vomited. In some the pulse was quick, in others slow, in many irregular, and in all feeble. All who could describe their complaints had violent headache, some of them tenesmus, and a few diarrhœa. In a few days all recovered except the first four and three others who had descended to the deeper parts of the mine.[1]—Another accident of the same nature, and followed by the same phenomena, happened more lately at Leadhills.[2] Similar accidents have been also witnessed by Mr. Bald, civil engineer, among the coal-miners who work in the neighbourhood of a burning mine belonging to the Devon Company. It is worthy of remark, that the men sometimes worked for a considerable length of time before they were taken ill. Such being the case, it will be readily conceived that the burning of the lights was not a test of the wholesomeness of the air. Here, as at Leadhills and in other instances already mentioned, the lights continued to burn where the men were poisoned.[3]
5. Somewhat analogous to the symptoms now described are the effects of the gradual contamination of air in a confined apartment. Every one must have read of the horrible death of the Englishmen who were locked up all night in a close dungeon in Fort William at Calcutta. One hundred and forty-six individuals were imprisoned in a room twenty feet square, with only one small window; and before next morning all but 23 died under the most dreadful of tortures,—that of slowly increasing suffocation. They seem to have been affected nearly in the same way as the workmen at Leadhills.[4] A similar accident happened in London in 1742. The keeper of the round-house of St. Martin's, crammed 28 people into an apartment six feet square and not quite six feet high; and four were suffocated.[5]
The morbid appearances left on the body after poisoning with carbonic acid gas have been chiefly observed in persons killed by charcoal vapour. According to Portal the vessels of the brain are congested, and the ventricles contain serum; the lungs are distended, as if emphysematous; the heart and great veins are gorged with black fluid blood; the eyes are generally glistening and prominent, the face red, and the tongue protruded and black.[6]—Gorging of the cerebral vessels seems to be very common. Yet sometimes it is inconsiderable, as in two cases related by Dr. Bright, where, except in the sinuses and in the greater veins of the ventricles and substance of the brain, no particular gorging or vascularity seems to have been met with,—the external membranes in particular having been very little injected.[7] This, however, is certainly a rare occurrence. Serous effusion in the ventricles and under the arachnoid membrane is very general, yet not invariable.—Dr. Schenck, medical inspector
- ↑ Edinburgh Med. and Surg. Journal, xiii. 353.
- ↑ Ibidem, xxxii. 345.
- ↑ Edin. New Phil. Journal, v. 110.
- ↑ Holwell, Narrative of the deplorable Deaths of the English gentlemen and others who were suffocated in the Black Hole at Fort William.
- ↑ Smith's Principles of Forensic Medicine, 221.
- ↑ Instruction sur le traitement des Asphyxiés, 25.
- ↑ Reports of Medical Cases, ii. 226, 227.
