331 
1889 - 90 .] Mr Dott and Dr Stockman on Morphine. 
the cerebrum in the same way remains doubtful, as death occurs 
early in such cases from paralysis of the respiratory centre. The only 
method of determining this point would be to apply morphine directly 
to the brain. We were unable to carry out such experiments, but the 
results of certain observations by Deguise, Dupuy, and Leuret seem 
to show that large doses of morphine applied to the brain directly do 
produce convulsions. In Part II. of their paper, Experiments 11, 
12, 13, 16 and others (dogs and rabbits), the injection of morphine 
solutions into the lateral ventricle, or their application to the cortex, 
produced well-marked convulsions of an epileptiform character. 
For purposes of comparison it is necessary to refer briefly to the 
action of morphine on some of the other systems. In dogs and cats, 
nausea, vomiting, and slight diarrhoea are always very prominent 
symptoms, unless the dose be very small. In man, as is well known, 
small doses cause constipation, but nausea and vomiting, with some- 
times slight looseness of the bowels, are not infrequently observed. 
The exact reason of this is still to be explained, but Alt has 
recently shown that morphine given hypodermically is very rapidly 
secreted into the stomach, and no doubt the consequent irritation 
is sufficient to account for the intestinal symptoms. 
The heart and blood-vessels are affected very slightly, and only 
secondarily to the nervous system. Owing to dulling of the vaso- 
motor centre there is slight loss of tone in the arteries, accompanied 
by a correspondingly slight fall of blood pressure. The pupil is 
contracted during the narcotic stage, but as soon as tetanic symptoms 
develop, it begins to dilate, and often is fully dilated during the 
greater part of the poisoning. The respiratory centre is very much 
depressed, and respiration greatly slowed, even with small doses. 
As the object of our research was to compare the action of mor- 
phine with the actions of a number of bodies closely related to it 
chemically, we thought that the best plan to obtain an accurate idea 
of their relative toxicity and effects would be to ascertain the mini- 
mum dose which produced visible symptoms, and by gradually 
increasing it until the minimum lethal dose was reached, we had a 
complete picture of the general action of the substance. Owing to the 
large number of alkaloids investigated by us, it was necessary to 
confine our experiments almost entirely to frogs and rabbits, the 
information thus obtained being sufficient for purposes of com- 
