He soaked the positive electrode in the starch and then jammed the two against the soft red meat. Then he applied the current.
A few moments later he withdrew the positive electrode. Both it and the meat under it were blue!
“What has happened?” he asked. “The iodine ions have actually passed through the beef to the positive pole and the paper on the electrode. Here we have starch iodide.”
It was a startling idea, this of the introduction of a substance by electrolysis.
“I may say,” he resumed, “that the medical view of electricity is changing, due in large measure to the genius of the Frenchman, Dr. Leduc. The body, we know, is composed largely of water, with salts of soda and potash. It is an excellent electrolyte. Yet most doctors regard the introduction of substances by the electric current as insignificant or nonexistent. But on the contrary the introduction of drugs by electrolysis is regular and far from being insignificant may very easily bring about death.
“That action,” he went on, looking from one of us to another, “may be therapeutic, as in the cure for lead poisoning by removing the lead, or it may be toxic—as in the case of actually introducing such a poison as strychnine into the body by the same forces that will remove the lead.”
He paused a moment, to enforce the point which had already been suggested. I glanced about hastily. If anyone in his little audience was guilty, no one betrayed it, for all were following him, fascinated. Yet in the wildly throbbing brain of some one of them the guilty knowledge must be seared indelibly. Would the mere accusation be enough to dissociate the truth from, that brain or would Kennedy have to resort to other means?
“Some one,” he went on, in a low, tense voice, leaning forward, “some one who knew this effect placed strychnine salts on one of the electrodes of the bath which Owen Minturn was to use.”
He did not pause. Evidently he was planning to let the force of his exposure be cumulative, until from its sheer momentum it carried everything before it.
“Walter,” he ordered quickly. “Lend me a hand.”