». we irresolutely and culpably stand pow-wowing with anti- 
ARS—ARS 
dotes. 1 have lost two patients, (suicides,) who took rats- 
bane, (arsenious acid,)—the last, a German redemptioner 
in the Alms-House. I have nothing on my conscience, as 
I should have had, if | could have believed in antidotes for 
this poison. I recovered, in 1823, a whole family, in this 
city—old Col. Archibald Steele (of the Revolution, ) his 
daughter and son-in-law (Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, ) and their 
child, who had been poisoned by arsenic, murderously 
mixed with a chicken-pye—by ipecacuanha in enormous 
doses, and incredible quantities of warm water. They were 
all in imminent jeopardy, particularly the child, whom I 
‘thought dying, for an hour. The supposed antidotes were 
hard by, in an apothecary’s shop ; but I preferred the plan 
just mentioned, and perseverance in it, by puking the pa- 
_ tients as long as I dared to do, even to alarming prostra- 
_ tion—and producing reaction by wet stimulating frictions. 
These facts are me’ d, to impress on your minds 
the inefficacy of any nmon-sense practice, in poi- 
soning from arsenic, I think antidotes would have killed 
Mepicat Prorertizs ann Uses. Arsenic, under various 
forms, has been employed from a very early period. 
Strictly speaking, it is an Oriental medicine, having been 
in vogue immemorially in India, and indeed all over the 
East, as a most powerful alterant, It was probably intro- 
duced into European practice, by the medical students, 
under the brilliant Caliphate of Bagdad; and seems to 
have been first appropriated to the cure of intermittents, 
by the Jewish physicians of Poland. 
Used, in the time of Sir George Baker, with opium, in 
intermittents. The influence of his writings, and those 
of French physicians, was exterminated from physicians’ 
bottles. Yet, under the French Directory, a preparation, 
similar to Fowler’s solution, formed a part of the political: 
constitution of the day; and by an edict, the surgeons 
be Army of oe ee rans Sages to cure the soldiery, _ 
agues caught in the marshes of Lombardy, by this re-_ 
medy, under pain of military punishment. ees one 
ever heard of any dogmatism, equal in absurd exercise of 
authority to this—saye, indeed, something like it in the 
opinion of Sir James M’Gregor, Director General of the 
medical staff of the British army, who has asserted, that © 
every surgeon, or other medical officer of the army, ought 
to be compelled, by an edict of the Lords Commissioners, 
to believe in contagion!!! In its reguline state, arsenic is 
imert, or nearly so, on the system—oxygenized only, it is 
