The medical detective : a poison museum for students : aids in tracing crime.

Date:
[1914]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The medical detective : a poison museum for students : aids in tracing crime. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    1/8
    £7t. ^ UrAi^ Tlie remarkable progress made during the last few years in the science of legal medicine has led to the formation at University College Hospital Medical School of a museum of speci- mens for the use of students reading this subject. The museum, though as yet a small one, is, as was reported in The Times of Satur- day, of a highly interesting character, and illustrates how many difficulties and pitfalls surround the medico-legal expert who is called upon to give evidence in an important case. Poisons and specimens illustrating the effects of poisons on the tissues and organs of the ' body necessarily occupy an important place in the collection. Arranged round the walls of the museum are bottles and jars containing samples of all the common toxic substances— arsenic, antimony, prussic acid, carbolic acid, oxalic acid, mercury, belladonna, opium, nux vomica, calabar bean, croton seeds, and many others, and of a number of the rarer varieties, including hyoscyamine, of sinister repute since the Crippen trial, and pyridin, a most deadly liquid which in very minute quantities is found in dirty tobacco-pipes, and which, with nico- tine, accounts for the disastrous effects of over-smoking. In addition to the actual poisonous substances, there are frames con- taining the leaves of poisonous plants ; these have been collected as an aid to the identifica- tion of material found in the stomachs of persons the circumstances of whose deaths may have given rise to suspicion.