Io8 POISONS : THEIR EFFECTS AND DETECTION. [§ 8l. 
coarser and more obvious character, and can therefore be better 
appreciated. 
§ 81. Effects of the Liquid Acid .—There is one distinction between 
poisoning by hydrochloric and the other mineral acids—namely, the 
absence of corrosion of the skin. Ad. Lesser 1 has established, by direct 
experiment, that it is not possible to make any permanent mark on the 
skin by the application even of the strongest commercial acid (40 per 
cent.). Hence, in any case of suspected poisoning by acid, should there 
be stains on the lips and face as from an acid, the presumption will be 
rather against hydrochloric. The symptoms themselves differ very little 
from those produced by sulphuric acid. The pathological appearances 
also are not essentially different, but hydrochloric is a weaker acid, and 
the extensive disorganisation, solution, and perforation of the viscera, 
noticed occasionally with sulphuric acid, have never been found in hydro¬ 
chloric acid poisoning. We may quote here the following case :— 
A woman, under the influence of great and sudden grief—not unmixed 
with passion—drew a bottle from her pocket, and emptied it very 
quickly. She immediately uttered a cry, writhed, and vomited a yellow- 
green fluid. The abdomen also became enlarged. Milk was given her, 
but she could not swallow it, and death took place, in convulsions, two 
hours after the drinking of the poison. 
The post-mortem appearances were briefly as follows :—Mouth and 
tongue free from textural change : much gas in the abdomen, more espe¬ 
cially in the stomach ; the membranes of the brain congested ; the lungs 
filled with blood. The stomach was strongly pressed forward, of a dark 
brown-red, and exhibited many irregular blackish spots, varying from 
two lines to half an inch in diameter (the spots were drier and harder 
than the rest of the stomach) ; the mucous membrane, internally, was 
generally blackened, and changed to a carbonised, shaggy, slimy mass, 
while the organ was filled with a blackish homogeneous pulp, which had 
no odour. The gullet was also blackened. A considerable quantity of 
hydrochloric acid was separated from the stomach. 2 
The termination in this instance was unusually rapid. In a case 
detailed by Casper, 3 in which a boy drank an unknown quantity of acid, 
death took place in seven hours. In Guy’s Hospital museum, the duo¬ 
denum and stomach are preserved of a patient who is said to have died 
in nine and a half hours from half an ounce of the acid. The same 
quantity, in a case related by Taylor, caused death in eighteen hours. 
From these and other instances, it may be presumed that death from 
acute poisoning by hydrochloric acid will probably take place within 
1 Virchow’s Archiv f. path. Anat., Bd. xxxiii. Hft. 2 , S. 215, 1881. 
2 Preuss. med. Vereinszeit. u. Fredericks Blatter f. gerichtl. Anthropoloqie, 1858, 
Hft. G, S. 70. 
3 Case 230. Gerichtliche Medicin , 6th ed., Berlin, 187G. 
