Remarks and comments on the medical and chemical evidence adduced at the trial of John Tawell / by G. L. Strauss.

  • Strauss, G.L.
Date:
1845
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks and comments on the medical and chemical evidence adduced at the trial of John Tawell / by G. L. Strauss. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    T-hus for the seven-tenths of one grain of prussic acid which we find reported in the English books on this subject, we must substite at the least two grains and one-fourth. Had Mr. Baron Parke known this fact, he would probably have ab- stained from stating in his summing up that a larger amount of - prussic acid had been found',in the stomach of deceased than would be quite sufficient to destroy life. (I may here just as well observe, en passant, that it was in this identical case of the seven epilectic patients, that the physicians charged with the post-mortem examination professed they could not detect the odor of prussic acid. Messrs. Gay-Lussac and Orfila, how- ever, found no difficulty in detecting this peculiar odor in the contents of the stomach, even so late as eight days after death.) ^ Can there be a grosser blunder than this?* And yet it is formule de M. Magendie 1-130 d’acide cyanhydrique, avait ete prepare a la pharmacie centrale avec 9 parties de sirop de sucre et une partie d’acide medicinal, d’apres la formule de l’ancien codex. Chaque malade, ayant pris 11 grammes 50 centigrammes de ce sirop, se trouva avoir avale 1 gramme 15 centigrammes d’acide medicinal, dose exorbitante et que 1’homme le plus robuste ne saurait supporter sans perir presque imme- diatement. Evidemment la formule du codex etait monstrueuse, et l’on devait se hater de la remplacer par celle qui etait gencraleinent employee par les praticiens de Paris et dans laquelle l’acide cyanhydrique n’entre que pour 1-130. Aujourd’hui que la substitution dont je parle a eu lieu, on ne verra plus se renouveller d’aussi affligeantes meprises. * Another case was quoted from Taylor, where an individual was reported to have taken one drachm and a half of Scheele’s acid, and to have suffered from the effects for thirteen days after. This, Taylor states, to have been the largest dose ever administered without killing. Now it happened that the dose in this case was much stronger. The case alluded to, is that of Doctor Bertin of Rennes. Doctor Bertin had been in the habit of taking comparatively large doses of prussic acid, and had thus in some measure got accustomed to the action of that poison. The country apothecary from whom he used to obtain the acid, probably did not prepare it strictly according to Magendie’s formula—the acid must have been very considerably weaker than the