POISONING BY MORPHIA. 
597 
who does not happen to possess metrical weights and measures. A patient 
travelling abroad could depend upon having the same dose of rhubarb in London, 
Paris, Brussels, Rome, or New York. A Frenchman in London would not be 
then inevitably constrained to take his prescriptions to a “ Pharmacie Franqaise;” 
even u Ici on parle Franqais” would lose its charm for him, and the universal 
system would do more to cement international friendship than any amount of 
commercial treaties, already protested against by the factors of Rouen, the 
ribbon-makers of Coventry, and the iron-masters of the North. From a phy¬ 
sicist’s or a merchant’s point of view, the simplification, and consequent assimi¬ 
lation, to the other great countries’ systems, cannot be otherwise than extremely 
desirable. Its decimal relation to the territorial meridian renders it at once 
independent of all such complicated contrivances as the measurement of the 
beat of a pendulum of a certain length under atmospheric conditions always 
liable to variation and consequent error, as is the case with the standard of our 
present systems of longitudinal, and its derivative measurements. If High 
Church clergy indulge in visionary ideas of a united visible church, we may 
surely be excused the more reasonable and probable hope of a homogeneous 
system of international weights and measures. 
Pharmaceutists, representing as they do the most intelligent and scientific 
class of any trading body, ought to be the first to adopt and revel in the abso¬ 
lute luxury of enjoying the beautiful simplicity of the metric system. Pre¬ 
scribes, it is to be hoped, will avail themselves of the opportunity of thus lead¬ 
ing the van of progress, sanctioned already in a tacit manner by the compilers 
of our national Pharmacopoeia. Apologizing for thus trespassing, 
I remain, dear Sir, 
Yours obediently, 
Birmingham , May 15, 1808. Ernest Agnew. 
POISONING BY MORPHIA. 
At the Central Criminal Court, May 7, before Mr. Justice Willes, Henry Harman, 
47, was indicted for the manslaughter of George Bagley. On April 3rd, the deceased, 
was admitted as a patient into the infirmary of the Lambeth Workhouse, where the 
prisoner was an attendant, whose duty it was to wash and put the patients to bed, 
but not to administer medicine. According to the evidence of Robert Smith, one of 
the patients in the same ward, the prisoner had threatened the deceased, who had been 
rather troublesome, that he would give him something that would make him quiet; 
and that he (Smith) saw the prisoner take the morphia bottle and give the deceased 
half a cupful of the mixture. This was given about seven o’clock in the evening, and 
at four o’clock the next morning the nurse was unable to wake him; and when Mr. 
Bullen, the surgeon of the workhouse, saw him, he was insensible, with stertorous 
respiration. When admitted, the patient was labouring under paralysis of the left side, 
and this induced Mr. Bullen to think that a new accession of the disease had taken place. 
A post mortem examination revealed no trace of morphia in the stomach, and from that 
he concluded that it had been absorbed into the brain. Had he not heard the statement 
of Smith, he should have concluded that the man had died from paralysis. From the 
evidence of the nurse it appeared there was no medicine chest; all the medicines were 
kept on shelves, the morphia bottle among them, and this was not labelled “poison.” 
The dispenser stated that the morphia mixture was composed of 10 grains of acetate of 
morphia, 2^ drachms of Battley’s solution of opium, with water to fill up a pint. Mr. 
Justice Willes, in summing up the case, told the jury it must be made out first of all 
that the act proved to have been done really did bring about or accelerate the death of 
the man. If so, then they must be satisfied the prisoner was guilty of criminal miscon¬ 
duct in the act, such criminal misconduct consisting of the negligent administration of a 
thing which he knew, or ought to have known, to be of a deadly character. They had 
it in evidence that the surgeon found evidences in the body of the deceased of a long¬ 
standing disease, and, but for the account given him by the witness Smith, would have 
