A treatise on poisons, in relation to medical jurisprudence, physiology, and the practice of physic / By Robert Christison.

  • Christison, Robert, Sir, 1797-1882.
Date:
1836
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on poisons, in relation to medical jurisprudence, physiology, and the practice of physic / By Robert Christison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    871/918 (page 833)
    fection produced differs much in different epidemics and even in different cases of the same epidemic. Two distinct sets of symptoms have been noticed; the one constituting a nervous disease, which is characterized by violent spasmodic convulsions, the other being a depraved state of the constitution, which ends in that remarkable disorder, dry gangrene; and it does not ap- pear that the two affections are apt to be blended together in the same case. The first form of disease, the Convulsive Ergotism of the French writers, has been very well described by Taube, a Ger- man physician, as it occurred in the North of Germany in 1770-1. In its most acute form, it commenced suddenly with dimness of sight, giddiness and loss of sensibility, followed soon by dreadful cramps and convulsions of the whole body, risus sardonicus, yellowness of the countenance, excessive thirst, ex- cruciating pains in the limbs and chest, small, often impercep- tible pulse; and such cases usually proved fatal in twenty-four or forty-eight hours. In the milder cases the convulsions came on in paroxysms, were preceded for some days by weakness and weight of the limbs, and a strange feeling as of insects crawling over the legs, arms, and face; in the intervals between the fits the appetite was voracious, the pulse natural, the excretions re- gular ; and the disease either terminated in recovery with scat- tered suppurations, cutaneous eruptions, anasarca or diarrhoea, or it proved in the end fatal amidst prolonged sopor and con- vulsions. *. Another more recent and very clear account of this form of the disease has been given by Dr Wagner of Schlie- ben from his experience of an epidemic which prevailed in the neighbourhood of that place so lately as the years 1831 and 1832. In consequence of unusual moisture and late frosts in the summer of 1831 the rye was so much spurred in many fields that a fifth at least of the pickles were diseased. As soon as the country people began to use the new rye, convulsive ergotism began to show itself, and it recurred more or less till next mid- summer, when the diseased grain was all consumed. The usual symptoms were at first periodic weariness, afterwards an uneasy sense of contraction in the hands and feet, and at length violent and permanent contraction of the flexor muscles of the arms, legs, feet, hands, fingers and toes, with frequent attacks of a * Taube—Geschichte der Kriebelkrankheit, quoted in Robert's paper, p. 209. 3 G