728 POISONS : THEIR EFFECTS AND DETECTION. [§ 946 . 
chloride from 4 decigrams up to 3 grms. (48 grains) daily, given, of 
course, in divided doses. Pirondi himself took in a day 7-7 grms. (119 
grains) without bad effect. 
§ 946. Symptoms. —The local action of barium salts must be sharply 
distinguished from the action of the absorbed salts. Robert divides the 
symptoms into seven groups :— 
1. Local, consisting in malaise , nausea, salivation, vomiting, and 
pain in the stomach. This group merges so much into the next as 
hardly to admit of precise separation. 
2. Excitation of the alimentary canal, both of the nervous and 
muscular apparatus ;• hence vomiting, painful colic, and acute diarrhoea. 
All these phenomena may be produced in animals by subcutaneous 
injection, and therefore do not depend alone upon local action. 
3. Excitation of the brain motor centres, which leads to convulsions, 
or may result in paralysis. About half the recorded cases of barium 
poisoning in the human subject have been convulsed, the other half 
paralysed. In one case mania resulted. 
4. Weakness or destruction of the power of muscular contraction ; 
this produces in frogs, when the muscular test movements are recorded 
graphically, a veratrin-like convulsion curve. In the human subject the 
effect is that of great muscular weakness. 
5. Digitalin-like influence on the heart and blood-vessels, showing 
itself in great slowing of the pulse, prsecordial anxiety, and strong 
beating of the heart (not only sensible to the patient, but which can 
be heard and felt by the bystanders). The arteries are incompressible 
and rigid, the blood-pressure strikingly raised. The blood-vessels of 
old people do not stand the pressure, hence haemorrhages in the lungs ; 
stomach, and other organs. Frogs die with the heart in systole. 
6. Catarrhal affection of the conjunctiva, the mucous membrane of 
the respiratory tract, and the nose. 
7. Formation of insoluble baryta salts in the blood-vessels, accord¬ 
ing to Onsum. This has not been observed in man, and the fact is 
disputed (see ante). 
In Dr Tidy’s case, 1 in which a man suffering from rheumatism, but 
otherwise healthy, took a mixture of barium nitrate, flowers of sulphur, 
and potassic chlorate, instead of sulphur, the symptoms were blisters on 
the tongue, a burning pain in the gullet and stomach, with vomiting, 
diarrhoea, convulsions, aphonia, and coldness of the extremities. A case, 
copiously detailed by Seidel, 2 in which a pregnant woman, 28 years 
old, took carbonate of baryta for the purpose of self-destruction, is in¬ 
teresting. She probably took the poison some little time before six in 
the evening ; she vomited and had great pain in the stomach, but slept 
1 Pharm. Journ., June 18G8. 
2 Eulenberg’s Vierteljahrsschriftf.ger. Med., Bel. xxvii. §213. 
