Α % TREATISE ON POISON S, IN RELATION TO MEDICAL JURISPRUDENCE, PHYSIOLOGY, AND THE PRACTICE OF PHYSIC. BY ROBERT CHRISTISON, M. D. PROFESSOR OF MATERIA MEDICA IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH; ROYAL MEDICAL SOCIETIES OF EDINBURGH; HON. MEMBER OF THE PORTSMOUTH AND PORTSEA LIT. AND PHIL. INSTITUTION; CORR. MEMBER OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF MEDICINE OF PARIS, AND THE THIRD EDITION. EDINBURGH: ADAM & CHARLES BLACK, NORTH BRIDGE; MDCCCXXXV. PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. THE approbation with which the public has received the Author's previous attempts to add to English Medical literature a systematic Treatise on Toxicology again requires him to express his acknowledgments for its reception, and to prepare a Third Edition embracing the newest improvements in Toxicological science. The discoveries and observations of so short a period as four years, which have elapsed since the last appearance of this work, have enabled him to add many new illustrations of the principles formerly advanced regarding the physiology, symptoms, and pathology of poisoning, to improve in some respects several processes of analysis, and also to introduce a few subjects altogether new. Although the work has in consequence been again considerably extended, it might have been enlarged to a much greater extent had he comprised all the additional facts and illustrations which have come under his notice personally or in the course of reading. The necessity thus entailed of making a selection, while it ought to render the present additions the more valuable, is farther a most gratifying proof of the increasing ardour with which the department of Toxicology is at present cultivated. Some explanation may be required of a departure from this principle of selection in one division of the subject, that of Chemical Analysis. It would certainly have been desirable, in a work where succinctness is a material object, to confine the reader's attention to a single process for each poison, making choice of that which experience and express trial have shown to be the best among the many which have been lately proposed. The Author endeavoured to institute a course of experiments having this object in view. But he was soon led to abandon them as unsatisfactory and really of less importance than would at first sight appear. For any one who engages extensively in this line of investigation will satisfy himself ere long, that the proposers of processes of analysis for detecting poisons in the mixed state and in minute doses have often imagined their own processes superior to others in previous use, rather because they had acquired more practical skill in the application of them, than because the superiority is real. It has therefore appeared the best plan to give an account of every good new process for the more important poisons, and to point out that which in the Author's experience has answered well,-without, however, pretending to affirm that some of the others may not be equally convenient, delicate, and precise. October 1835. |