[65] Gross: Die Strafrechtspflege in Deutschland, 4, 1861, Heft I. S. 181.
Accidental poisoning is most common among children. The oily, syrupy-looking sulphuric acid, when pure, may be mistaken for glycerin or for syrup; and the dark commercial acid might, by a careless person, be confounded with porter or any dark-looking medicine.
Serious and fatal mistakes have not unfrequently arisen from the use of injections. Deutsch[66] relates how a midwife, in error, administered to mother and child a sulphuric acid clyster; but little of the fluid could in either case have actually reached the rectum, for the mother recovered in eight days, and in a little time the infant was also restored to health. Sulphuric acid has caused death by injections into the vagina. H. C. Lombard[67] observed a case of this kind, in which a woman, aged thirty, injected half a litre of sulphuric acid into the vagina, for the purpose of procuring abortion. The result was not immediately fatal, but the subsequent inflammation and its results so occluded the natural passage that the birth became impossible, and a Cæsarean section extracted a dead child, the mother also dying.
[66] Preuss. Med. Vereins-Zeitung, 1848, No. 13.
[67] Journ. de Chim. Méd., tom. vii., 1831.
An army physician prescribed for a patient an emollient clyster. Since it was late at night, and the apothecary in bed, he prepared it himself; but not finding linseed oil, woke the apothecary, who took a bottle out of one of the recesses and placed it on the table. The bottle contained sulphuric acid; a soldier noticed a peculiar odour and effervescence when the syringe was charged, but this was unheeded by the doctor. The patient immediately after the operation suffered the most acute agony, and died the following day; before his death, the bedclothes were found corroded by the acid, and a portion of the bowel itself came away.[68]