VEGETABLE POISONS. 221 



drinks, general and local bleeding, fomentations 

 and blisters, saline diaphoretic medicines, the 

 warm bath, and lastly, cordial medicines, with 

 wine, opium, and a more generous diet are to 

 succeed each other in the order in which the 

 symptoms present themselves, and to be applied 

 in the way that circumstances shall suggest, or 

 omitted, if there be no indication for their use. 



We come next to the consideration of those 

 vegetable substances which, from their more evi- 

 dent effect on the brain and nervous system, 

 have been termed narcotic, from narcosis to stu- 

 pify, and which taken in overdoses prove very 

 active poisons ; and as accidents from these sub- 

 stances are of much more frequent occurrence 

 than from those which have been termed the 

 acrid poisons, we shall enter more particularly 

 into their history, than we deemed necessary 

 when treating on the latter description of vege- 

 tables. 



We have had occasion to notice in an early 

 part of this paper, that a large nervous expan- 

 sion is peculiar to the structure of the stomach, 

 by which it sympathizes with the brain and ner- 

 vous system in a very remarkable degree. We 

 are, therefore, not to be surprised that those sub- 

 stances, which, by experience, we have ascer- 

 tained to possess narcotic qualities, should, 

 when received into the stomach, produce a train 

 of symptoms which are immediately referable to 



