The futility of experiments with drugs on animals / by Edward Berdoe.

  • Berdoe, Edward, 1836-1916.
Date:
1889
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The futility of experiments with drugs on animals / by Edward Berdoe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    be comparatively insusceptible to its action. Stille says that a hen, in progressive doses, at last took two-and-a-half drachms of nux vomica daily. It requires ten times as much strychnine to kill a chicken as would suffice for a pheasant. Yet half a drachm of this poison has proved fatal to human beings.—{Oinj and Ferrier's Forensic Medicine, 4th Ed., p. 572.) The ruminating animals are not so readily affected as other quadrupeds when the poison is taken by the mouth. Ten grains may fail to kill a sheep when thus administered, though half of a grain may kill a man. The same would be fatal to the sheep if administered hypodermically or into the veins. The action of the poison on ^the goat is similar to that on the sheep. In whatever way it is given to cats, whether by the stomach, injected into the veins, or under the skin, they resist it singularly, says Stille. Yet dogs are easily killed by it. It has been enclosed in fulminating bullets to kill whales, and it has been observed that when so poisoned they perish in the spasms which are so characteristic of its action on many other animals, yet guinea-pigs and monkeys are said to be comparatively insusceptible to it.—{Stille, loc. cit.) As we have said, half a grain has proved fatal to an adult, and it is on record that a child died in four hours from taking one-sixteenth of a grain. Dr. Lauder-Brunton minutely details the atruoiUusly cruel experiments of Majendie on the physio- logical action of strychnine upon dogs. He terms the modus operandi a model of this method of research. As the great English experimenter so highly praises the system followed by the most cruel perhaps of all the foreign physiologists, it is only fair to assume that it is imitated in our English labora- tories. Dr. Lauder-Brunton in page 147 of his Text Book of Pharmacologij has lifted the veil for us. The strychnine was introduced under the skin of the thigh of a dog; soon the poison began to produce symptoms of general malaise ; the poor beast took shelter in a corner of