recovery. Next day she was occasionally incoherent, and had twitches of the facial muscles; the hands and face were swelled, the eyelids dingy, the conjunctivæ injected, and the nails blue. On the morning of the fifteenth there was for two hours violent delirium and fierce maniacal excitement, which were succeeded by coma, and this by death in the course of the evening. There was no diarrhœa, or urinary complaint, and no paralysis or eruption on the skin. A variety of circumstances of a general nature, which it would be out of place to enumerate here,—the detection of arsenic in various articles of which the woman had partaken, and in which the arsenic had been dissolved sometimes simply, sometimes with the aid of an alkali,—together with the fact, that the body five months after death was found preserved from decay, as it is now well known to be in most cases of arsenical poisoning,—left little doubt that the woman died of the effects of arsenic taken in several small doses at distant intervals, although none could be detected in the stomach or intestines. The case did not go to trial, owing to the death of an essential witness.
The effects of arsenic on man, when introduced into the living body through other channels besides the stomach, will now require some observations. It is necessary for the medical jurist to be well acquainted with them, because there is hardly an accessible part of the human body to which this poison has not been applied either accidentally or by design. When some account was given of its comparative action on the different tissues of animals, it was observed that arsenic acts when applied to a wound or ulcer, to the peritonæal membrane, to the eye, and to the vagina. On man it has been known to act through an ulcer or wound, the inner membrane of the rectum, the membrane of the vagina, the membrane of the air-tubes, the membrane of the nose, and even the sound skin.
Many persons have been poisoned by the application of arsenic to surfaces deprived of the cuticle, such as blistered surfaces, eruptions, ulcers, or wounds. When applied in this manner it commonly induces both local inflammation and constitutional symptoms. Amatus Lusitanus relates the case of a young man, who, against the advice of his physician, anointed an itchy eruption of the skin with an arsenical ointment, and next day was found dead in bed.[1] A similar case, not so rapidly fatal, has been recorded by Wepfer. A girl, affected with psoriasis of the scalp, had it rubbed with a liniment of butter and arsenic. In a short time she was seized with acute pain and swelling of the whole head, fainting-fits, restlessness, fever, delirium, and she died in six days.[2] Zitmann has noticed the cases of two children, eight and ten years of age, who were killed by the application of an arsenical solution to a similar eruption of the head.[3] And Belloc relates the case of a woman who, trying to cure an inveterate itch with an arsenical lotion, was attacked in consequence with severe erysipelas of the whole body, succeeded by tremors and
