With more moderate and yet large doses, nausea and vomiting are very prominent symptoms, and are seldom delayed more than half an hour. The regular course of symptoms may therefore be summed up thus:—A metallic taste in the mouth, repeated vomitings, which are sometimes bloody, great faintness and depression, pains in the abdomen and stomach, and diarrhœa, which may be involuntary. If the case is to terminate fatally, the urine is suppressed, the temperature falls, the face becomes cyanotic, delirium and convulsions supervene, and death occurs in from two to six days. Antimony, like arsenic, often produces a pustular eruption. Solitary cases deviate more or less from the course described, i.e., severe cramps affecting all the muscles, hæmorrhage from the stomach, kidney, or bowel, and death from collapse in a few hours, have all been noticed. In a case recorded by Mr. Morley,[808] a surgeon’s daughter, aged 18, took by mistake an unknown quantity of antimonial wine; she soon felt sleepy and powerless, and suffered from the usual symptoms in combination with tetanic spasms of the legs. She afterwards had enteritis for three weeks, and on recovery her hair fell off. Orfila relates a curious case of intense spasm of the gullet from a large dose of tartar emetic.
[808] Brit. Med. Journ., Oct. 14, p. 70.
§ 758. Chronic Antimonial Poisoning.—The cases of Palmer and J. P. Cook, M. Mullen, Freeman, Winslow, Pritchard, and the remarkable Bravo case have, in late years, given the subject of chronic antimonial poisoning a considerable prominence. In the trials referred to, it was shown that medical men might easily mistake the effects of small doses of antimony given at intervals for the action of disease—the symptoms being great nausea, followed by vomiting, chronic diarrhœa, alternating with constipation, small frequent pulse, loss of voice, great muscular weakness, depression, with coldness of the skin and a clammy perspiration. In the case of Mrs. Pritchard,[809] her face was flushed, and her manner so excited as to give an ordinary observer the idea that she had been drinking; and with the usual symptoms of vomiting and purging, she suffered from cramps in the hands. Dr. Pritchard tried to make it appear that she was suffering from typhoid fever, which the symptoms in a few respects only resembled.
[809] Edin. Med. Journ., 1865.