- cording to information communicated by herself, she had been ill
with sickness, vomiting, purging, and pain in the stomach and bowels since the Tuesday evening. This evidence, if it could have been relied on, would have altered materially the features of the case, as it would have gone far to supply what all the medical witnesses considered defective, namely, proof of the administration. But at the time the surgeon made his inquiries, he did not even suspect that the girl laboured under the effects of poison. Neither he therefore nor his patient could have been impressed with that conviction of the importance of the information communicated, which was necessary to insure its accuracy, particularly as it related to a matter usually of so little consequence in ordinary medical practice as the precise date of the commencement of an illness; and it would consequently have been rash to adopt it in face of more direct and contrary evidence. Any one who examines the details of this trial as I have reported them, will at once see how much the case turned on the point now alluded to.[1]
CHAPTER III.
OF IMAGINARY PRETENDED, AND IMPUTED POISONING.
The present seems the most convenient place for noticing the general
mode of procedure by which the medical jurist may detect
cases of imaginary, feigned, and imputed poisoning. It is by no means
easy to lay down rules for the investigation of cases suspected to be
of such a kind. But an attempt will be made to state the leading
points to be attended to, and to illustrate them by the circumstances
of a few examples of each variety.
Imaginary poisoning should rarely be the occasion of deception or embarrassment. The same wandering of the imagination which has led to a belief of injury from poison, will commonly also lead to such extravagant notions relative to the mode of administration and the symptoms, as will infallibly point out the true nature of the case to one who is well acquainted with the real effects of poisons. It is easy, nevertheless, to conceive cases which may be embarrassing; and certainly, in every instance, the physician should proceed in his inquiries with caution.
It appears to me that in the first place, without seeming to take up at once the conviction of his patient, he should scrupulously abstain from treating it lightly, and should on the whole act rather as if he suspected poison had been given. Allowing his patient therefore apparently credit for the truth of his suspicions, the medical attendant should request him to give a full history of existing symptoms, of
- ↑ Edin. Med. and Surg. Journal, xxvii. 441. The reader will remember that what was considered defective in the proof in this trial, the connection between the administration of a suspicious article and the first invasion of the symptoms, would now appear less so, for the reason assigned in note p. 77.
