COLCHICINE. 
433 
§ 526.] 
in the Registrar-General's returns for the five years ending 1916. F. A. 
Falck was able to collect from medical literature, prior to 1880, 55 cases, 
and he gives the following analysis of the cases :—In 2, colchicum was 
taken for suicidal purposes ; of the unintentional poisonings, 5 were from 
too large a medicinal dose of colchicum wine, syrup, or extract, given in 
cases of rheumatism ; in 13 cases, colchicum was used as a purgative ; 
42 cases were owing to mistaking different preparations for drinks or 
cordials—the tincture in 5, and the wine in 14, being taken instead of 
orange tincture, quinine wine, schnapps or Madeira ; in 1 case the corms 
were added to mulled wine, in another, the leaves consumed with salad ; 
in 16 cases (all children), the seeds of colchicum were eaten. Forty-six 
of the 55 died—that is, 83-7 per cent. 
In the remarkable trial at the Central Criminal Court, in 1862, of 
Margaret Wilson {Reg. v. Marg. Wilson), who was convicted of the 
murder of a Mrs Somers, the evidence given rendered it fairly probable 
that the prisoner had destroyed four people at different dates by colchi¬ 
cum. The symptoms in all four cases were—burning pain in the throat 
and stomach, intense thirst, violent vomiting and purging, coldness and 
clamminess of the skin, excessive depression, and great weakness. One 
victim died on the second day, another on the fifth, a third on the eighth, 
and the fourth on the fourteenth day. Schroff witnessed a case in which 
a man took 2 grms. (nearly 31 grains) of the corms ; in one and a half 
hours he experienced general malaise ; on the next day there were flying 
muscular pains, which at length were concentrated in the diaphragm, 
and the breathing became oppressed ; there was also pain in the neigh¬ 
bourhood of the duodenum, the abdomen was inflated with gas ; there 
was a sickly feeling and faintness. Then came on a sleepy condition 
lasting several hours, followed by fever, with excessive pain in the head, 
noises in the ears, and delirium ; there was complete recovery, but the 
abdomen continued painful until the fifth day. 
In another instance, a gentleman, aged 50, 1 had taken twenty-eight 
of Blair’s gout-pills in four and a half days for the relief of a rheumatic 
affection. He suffered from nausea, griping pains in the belly, consider¬ 
able diarrhoea, vomiting, and hiccough ; towards the end there were 
stupor, convulsive twitchings of the muscles, paralysis, and death. The 
fatal illness lasted fourteen days ; he was seen by three medical men at 
different dates—the first seems to have considered the case one of 
diarrhoea; the second, one of suppressed gout; but Dr C. Budd was 
struck with the similarity of the symptoms to those from an acrid 
poison, and discovered the fact that the pills had been taken. These 
pills were examined by the senior author ; they were excessively hard, 
and practically consisted of nothing else than the finely ground colchicum 
corms ; six pills yielded 8 mgrms. of colchicine, so that the whole twenty - 
1 See Lancet, 1881, i. 368. 
28 
