Abstract
THE following circumstance I think worth noticing. Wanting to banish some mice from a pantry, I placed on the floor at night a slice of bread spread over with butter in which I had mixed a threepenny packet of “Battle's vermin killer”, which contains about a grain of strychnia along with flour and prussian blue. The following morning I was roused by a servant telling me that a favourite skye terrier was lying dead. I found that the mice had dragged the slice of bread underneath the locked door and that the dog had thus got at it and eaten part equal to about one-sixth of a grain of strychnia; it lay on its side perfectly rigid; an occasional tetanic spasm showed that life was not quite extinct. Having notes of the experiments made by direction of the British Medical Association last year, on the antagonism of medicines, and wherein it was conclusively proved that a fatal dose of strychnia could be neutralised by a fatal dose of chloral hydrate, and that the minimum fatal dose of the latter for a rabbit was twenty-one grains, I at once injected under the dog's skin forty-five grains of the chloral in solution, my dog being about twice the weight of a rabbit. In a quarter of an hour fancying the dog was dead, as the spasms had ceased and it lay apparently lifeless, I moved it with my foot, when it at once struggled to its feet and shortly after staggered to its usual corner by the parlour fire; it took some milk, and except for being quieter than usual seemed nothing the worse for the ordeal it had passed through.
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HOLDEN, J. Strychnia and its Antidote. Nature 17, 360 (1878). https://doi.org/10.1038/017360c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/017360c0
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