§ 44-1 CARBON MONOXIDE. 75 
a bunsen burner “ lit below ” also evolves large quantities of the same 
poisonous gas. 1 
§ 44. Symptoms. —Nearly all the experience with regard to the 
symptoms produced by carbon monoxide is derived from breathing not 
the pure gas, but the gas diluted by air, by hydrogen, or by carburetted 
hydrogen, as in coal gas, or mixed with large quantities of carbon 
dioxide. Two assistants of Christison breathed the pure gas : the one 
took from two to three inhalations ; he immediately became giddy, 
shivered, had headache, and then became unconscious. The second 
took a bigger dose, for, after emptying his lungs as much as possible, 
he took from three to four inhalations ; he fell back paralysed, became 
unconscious, and remained half an hour insensible, and had the appear¬ 
ance of death, the pulse being almost extinguished. He was treated 
with inhalations of oxygen, but he remained for the rest of the day 
extremely ill ; he had convulsive muscular movements, stupor, headache, 
and quick irregular pulse ; on this passing away he still suffered from 
nausea, giddiness, alternate feeling of heat and chilliness, with some 
fever, and in the night had a restless kind of sleep. The chemist Chenot 
was accidentally poisoned by the pure gas, and is stated to have fallen 
as if struck by lightning after a single inspiration, and remained for a 
quarter of an hour unconscious. Other recorded cases have shown very 
similar symptoms. 
The pulse is at the onset large, full, and frequent ; it afterwards 
becomes small, slow, and irregular. The temperature sinks from 1° to 
3° C. The respiration, at first slow, later becomes rattling. As vomiting 
occurs often when the sufferer is insensible, the vomited matters have 
been drawn by inspiration into the trachea and even into the bronchi, 
so that death takes place by suffocation. 
The fatal coma may last, even when the person has been removed from 
the gas, from hours to days. Coma for three, four, and five days from 
carbon monoxide has been frequently observed. The longest case on 
record is that of a person who was comatose for eight days, and died on 
the twelfth day after the fatal inhalation. Consciousness in this case 
returned, but the patient again fell into the stupor and died. 
The slighter kinds of poisoning by carbon monoxide, as in the 
Staffordshire case recorded by Dr Reid (p. 79), in which for a long time 
a much-diluted gas has been breathed, produce pronounced headache 
and a feeling of ill-health and malaise, deepening, it may be, into a fatal 
slumber unless the person is removed from the deadly atmosphere. To 
the headache generally succeeds nausea, a feeling of oppression in the 
temples, a noise in the ears, feebleness, anxiety, and a dazed condition 
1 Thorp© (J. Chem. Soc., xxxiii. 318, 1903) has shown that an ordinary bunson 
burner heating a sand tray evolves about 0-022 of a cubic foot of carbon monoxide 
per hour. 
