112 Wtirden & Fedler— On the Nature of the [No. 1, 



fatal case ; he states that on " Saturday, April 6th, I was called at 6*35 

 p. M. to attend a girl 4 years old. I attended at 7.15 A. m. and found her 

 dead : the skin mottled all over, rigor mortis setting in and the body 

 nearly cold. The history was that she came in from play at 3'30 p. m. on 

 Friday, complaining of being tired. Her mother laid her down and she 

 slept at once, at 5*30 she awoke and took some milk and tea : im- 

 mediately she vomited some thin milky substance and went to bed, when 

 she slept somewhat restlessly until 10*30 p. m. wben she awoke with 

 vomiting and severe purging : this continued with pain until 5 A. M. when 

 she had a slight convulsion, and died at 5"30 A. M. A post-mortem 

 examination was made 30 hours after death. Rigor m.ortis had nearly 

 passed off. All the organs were healthy and normal, except that the 

 bases of both lungs were congested. The heart was empty in both 

 ventricles and firmly contracted. The stomach and small intestines 

 were thickly coated with a creamy lining of mucus, with bile : no blood. 

 The stomach farther contained half an inch of the fatal leaf : there was 

 also found about as much in one of the stools, and probably more was 

 passed. This with the firmly contracted heart constituted the chief 

 confirmatory evidence of the irritant nature of the poison which caused 

 death." — Ohevers,* quoting from a note by Dr. H. Cleghorn, states, 

 " There are several species of arum requiring examination, of a suspi- 

 " cious, if not of a poisonous nature. On one occasion five Mysore 

 " villagers were poisoned by partaking of the acrid rhizomes of an arum, 

 " imperfect specimens of which I sent to Dr. Wright for identification, 

 " but he could not distinguish the species. If the roots had been boiled, 

 " the fatal results would not have occurred, as is well-known, the 

 " deleterious property is easily driven off by heat." Dr. Chevers refers 

 to two other cases, one in which a man obtained from a drug dealer a 

 remedy for gonorrhoea, which appeared to have been a root of one of the 

 AroidecB ; fatal results ensued. 



In 1886 the Civil Surgeon of Dibrugarh forwarded to the Chemical 

 Examiner, Bengal, some portions of raw Bish Kachu tubers and leaves 

 with the following statement. " A cooly woman administered some of the 

 fried Kachu to another sick cooly on the same garden, but the man 

 experiencing a burning sensation in his mouth instantly spat it out. A 

 pig ate what was so thrown away and died in an hour. A second pig was 

 experimented on with some of the same stuff, and fatal results also 

 supervened." During the course of the same year a second case of 

 poisoning by Kachu was referred to the Chemical Examiner's Depart- 

 ment ; in this case slices of Kachu tubers were introduced into a jar 

 containing "goor." The symptoms induced were sufliciently urgent to 

 * A MaTinal of Medical Jurisprndence for India. 



