Ptomaines and other animal alkaloids : their detection, separation, and clinical features / by A.C. Farquharson.

Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Ptomaines and other animal alkaloids : their detection, separation, and clinical features / by A.C. Farquharson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    147/176 (page 131)
    pork, salt fish, mussels, mackerel, oysters, poi^;}^!;'^''' preserved turkey, pigeon pie, roes of the herring, sturgeon, pike, barbel and perch, tainted beef and mutton. The injurious effects attributable to certain substances taken as food have long been known, and Dr. George Johnson, in his Medical Lectures and Essays, mentions the fact of some Irish peasants who, in 1826, having made a stew of the flesh of a dead calf which they found on the sea-shore, soon developed choleraic symptoms, and death was ushered in by a comatose condition resembling opium poisoning. During the last ten years, however, many of the toxic substances developed in food materials have been isolated, their chemical and physio- logical characteristics defined, and this form of ptomaine poisoning is seen to be a well- defined disease. Gautier studied the action of ptomaines extracted from putrefying meat, according to their solubility in ether, chloroform and amylic alcohol, and the results he obtained have already been referred to (Chap. Ill, p. 43). It is not necessary to fall back on the physiological characteristics to show the existence of a ptomaine in tainted and