resembling imperfect apoplexy, united with delirium. Such cases, however, must be admitted to be rare; and the practice of taking snuff is in general unattended with injury.
Serious consequences have resulted from the application of tobacco to the abraded skin. In the Ephemerides an account is given of three children who were seized with giddiness, vomiting, and fainting from the application of tobacco-leaves to the head for the cure of ring-worm.[1] Dr. Merriman has also alluded to an instance of death in a child from the incautious employment of a strong decoction of tobacco as a lotion for ring-worm of the scalp.[2] And in Leroux's Journal there is an account of a man, who, after using a tobacco decoction for the cure of an eruptive disease, was seized with symptoms of poisoning, and died in three hours.[3]
In recent times poisoning with tobacco has been often produced by the employment of too large doses in the way of injection. Richard has mentioned a case, not fatal, which arose from an infusion of five leaves in a choppin of water, used as an injection by a lady for costiveness. She was immediately seized with colic, giddiness, buzzing in the ears, headache, nausea, and then syncope of seven hours' duration. During this period the breathing was difficult, the pulse very slow, the pupils dilated, the skin cold and moist, the urine suppressed, the efforts to vomit constant, and the belly depressed, contracted, and affected with constant borborygmus. She recovered under the use of emollient injections and fomentations.[4] Dr. Grahl of Hamburg has related minutely a fatal case, which arose from an ounce of rather more, boiled for fifteen minutes in water, and administered by advice of a female quack. The individual, who laboured merely under dyspepsia and obstinate costiveness, was seized in two minutes with vomiting, violent convulsions, and stertorous breathing, and died in three-quarters of an hour.[5] Another accident of the same kind is noticed in the Journal de Chimie Médicale, where the person became as it were intoxicated, and died immediately. Instead of an infusion of two drachms she had used a decoction of two ounces.[6]—M. Tavignot describes the following remarkable case occasioned by a similar dose. An infusion prepared by mistake with two ounces and one drachm, instead of a drachm and a half, was used as an injection for a stout man affected with ascarides. In seven minutes he was seized with stupor, headache, paleness of the skin, pain in the belly, indistinct articulation, and slight convulsive tremors, at first confined to the arms, but afterwards general. Extreme prostration and slow laborious breathing soon ensued, and then coma, which ended fatally in eighteen minutes.[7]—Even two drachms, however, or a drachm and a half, are by no means a safe dose. An
- ↑ Ephem. Cur. Nat. Dec. ii.—Ann. iv. p. 467.
- ↑ London Medical Gazette, 1839-40, i. 561.
- ↑ Journal de Chimie Médicale, 1839, 329.
- ↑ Ibidem, 165.
- ↑ Hufeland's Journal der Praktischen Heilkunde, lxxi. iv. 100.
- ↑ Journal de Chimie Médicale, iii. 23.
- ↑ Gazette Med. de Paris, 28 Novembre, 1840, or Edinburgh Med. and Surg. Journal, lv. 558.
