- ject. The point in the case I would particularly refer to is the declaration
of the medical inspector, that laudanum could not have been taken, because he did not find any by the smell or by chemical analysis in the contents of the stomach.[1]
3. Poisons may not be found, because the excess has been decomposed.
Vegetable and animal poisons may be altogether destroyed by the process of digestion. This observation will explain why sometimes no poison could be found in cases of poisoning with crude opium or other vegetable solids. A French physician, M. Desruelles, has related the case of a soldier, who died six hours and a half after swallowing two drachms of solid opium, and in whose stomach nothing was found but a yellowish fluid, quite destitute of the smell of the drug.[2]
Some mineral poisons, such as corrosive sublimate, lunar caustic, and hydrochlorate of tin, are also decomposed in the stomach. But they are not removed beyond the reach of chemical analysis. The decomposition is the result of a chemical, not of a vital process; and the basis of the poison may be found in the solid contents of the stomach under some other compound form. Other poisons again may be apt to elude detection by altering their form, by combining with other substances, without themselves undergoing decomposition. Thus it appears from a case related by Mertzdorff of Berlin, that, in poisoning with sulphuric acid, after the greater part of the poison is discharged by vomiting, the remainder may escape discovery by being neutralized: For, although he could not find any free acid in the contents of the stomach, he discovered 4-1/2 grains in union with ammonia by precipitation with muriate of baryta.[3]
It may be also right to mention another kind of decomposition which may render it impossible to detect a poison that has been really swallowed—namely, that arising from decay of the body. In several recent cases bodies have been disinterred and examined for poison months or even years after death. In these and similar cases it would be unreasonable to expect always to find the poison, even though it existed in the stomach immediately after death. Some poisons, such as oxalic acid, might be dissolved and then exude; others, such as the vegetable narcotics, will undergo putrefaction; and others, such as prussic acid, are partly votalized, partly decomposed, so as to be undistinguishable in the course of a few days only. The mineral poisons, those at least which are solid, are not liable to be so dissipated or destroyed. Some authors, indeed, have said that arsenic may disappear in consequence of its uniting with hydrogen disengaged during the progress of putrefaction, and so escaping in the form of arseniuretted hydrogen gas; and they have endeavoured to account in this way for the non-discovery of it in the bodies of the people who had been killed by arsenic, and disinterred for examination many months afterwards.[4] But the supposition is by no means probable:
