Medicinal use 145 



hours from the effect of chewing the leaves ; and 

 another fatal case occurred in the Shrewsbury 

 Asylum. Dr. Deas points out the dangerous con- 

 sequences which may at any time result from that 

 perversion of appetite which exists in certain cases 

 among the insane, leading them to eat anything 

 which comes in their way. In the presence of this 

 tendency it would certainly seem desirable that all 

 poisonous shrubs, and especially yew, should be 

 excluded from the grounds of asylums. 



Yew was employed as early as the seventeenth 

 century for medicinal purposes, and Lindley 1 tells 

 us, on the authority of an Italian physician, that 

 yew leaves, when administered to man in small 

 doses, have a power similar to that of digitalis 

 over the heart and arteries, reducing the circula- 

 tion, and, if persisted in too long, or given in too 

 large doses, as certainly fatal. Dr. SchrofP denies 

 that the opinion entertained by some physicians of 

 the similarity of operation between the properties 

 of yew and those of digitalis rests upon any phy- 

 siological basis. But then he asserts that the fruit 

 has no poisonous properties, a statement so fully 

 disproved as to throw considerable doubt on his 

 other allegations. I have undertaken a large series 

 of experiments with taxin, made on myself at 

 various times. The tracings of the pulse show 



1 Vegetable Kingdom, 231. 



2 Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft der aerzte ztt Wien, August 1859. 



K 



