[984] De la Tumeur Blanche de Genou, éd. 2, Paris, 1836.
[985] Gaz. Med. de Paris, 1835, No. 14.
§ 908. Symptoms.—The local action of barium salts must be sharply distinguished from the action of the absorbed salts. Kobert 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 diarrhœa. 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, præcordial 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 hæmorrhages in the lungs, stomach, and other organs. Frogs die with the heart in systole.