174 



POISONS 



The symptoms are severe pain in the mouth and stomach, 

 followed by collapse. The lips and tongue become swollen and 

 blistered, the abdomen tender, the pupils widely dilated, while 

 bullae appear on the skin. 



The treatment consists of stimulants and intramuscular injections 

 of ether, with mouth-washes. Internally opium, bromides, chlorate 

 of potash, bicarbonate of soda, or bismuth, made into an emulsion, 

 may be given. 



Fontainea pancheri, Heckel, 1870 (Euphorbiaceae), is a tree 

 growing in New Caledonia, the ingestion of the fruit of which 

 causes symptoms analogous to those produced by Hippomane 

 mancinelia. 



Illicium.- — Guerreras and de la Paz have also drawn atten- 

 tion to poisoning from a decoction of sanki, which is the fruit 

 Illicium religiosum v. Siebold, which belongs to the genus Illicium 

 Linnaeus, of the family Magnoliaece De Candolle, 1818. Montel 

 in Indo-China has also found it to be poisonous. The symptoms 

 appear to resemble cholera, but diagnosis has to be made from 

 strychnine-poisoning, tetanus, and cerebro-spinal meningitis. The 

 symptoms were vomiting, diarrhoea, thirst, unconsciousness, 

 convulsions, cramps, profuse sweating, oliguria and anuria, small 

 rapid pulse, cold extremities, paresis of the lower limbs, and ex- 

 haustion. The head is retracted, the eyeballs bulge, and the face 

 becomes cyanotic when the respiration stops. In China and Japan 

 it and its related species /. anisatum, the star anise, which is 

 harmless, are called badiane. 



The seeds of Ricinus communis Linnaeus (Euphorbiaceae), the 

 castor-oil plant, are poisonous, causing burning in the throat and 

 abdomen, vomiting, purging (may be absent), and collapse. The 

 fatal dose appears to be three seeds, and to kill in about forty-six 

 hours. Post-mortem the principal feature is gastro-intestinal 

 inflammation. 



The treatment is emetics, stimulants, and hypodermics of 

 morphia. 



III. STIMULANT AND SEDATIVE POISONING. 



Many drugs are employed all over the world to stimulate or 

 to deaden the nervous system. These stimulants and sedatives 

 have been used by man from time immemorable to whip up a 

 flagging nervous system, or to deaden the effects of mental or 

 bodily suffering. 



Used judiciously and in a proper manner there can be no doubt 

 that they alleviate human suffering, but if used injudiciously or 

 immoderately, and especially if they are constantly taken, they 

 become ' habit poisons,' and as such affect the cells of the body 

 injuriously, and by so doing some of them become true * racial 

 poisons,' and as such have been mentioned in the section on 

 Eugenics (see p. 118). 



