The case now under consideration is not a mere hypothetical one. Ernest Platner has related a very interesting example, which proves how easily poisoning of the kind supposed may be accomplished without suspicion. A servant-girl poisoned her mistress by mixing oxide of arsenic with a dish of mushrooms. She died in twenty hours, after suffering severely from vomiting and colic pains. On dissection there were found inflammation of the stomach, gangrenous spots in it, clots of blood in its contents, and redness of the intestines. Her death, however, was ascribed to the mushrooms having been unwholesome; and the real cause was not discovered till thirteen years after, when the girl was convicted of murdering a fellow-servant in a somewhat similar way by mixing arsenic with her chocolate, and then confessed both crimes.[[2444]]
Poisonous Mosses.—It is not improbable that some of the mosses possess poisonous properties similar to those of the deleterious fungi. Dr. Winkler of Innsbruch mentions that the Lycopodium selago is used in the Tyrol in the way of infusion for killing vermin on animals; and that unpleasant accidents have been produced in man by its accidental use. Its effects appear to be sometimes irritant, but more generally narcotic in their nature.[[2445]]
CHAPTER XL.
OF THE EFFECTS OF POISONOUS GRAIN AND PULSE.
The different sorts of grain are subject to certain diseases, in consequence of which meal or flour made from them is apt to be impregnated with substances more or less injurious to animal life. It is likewise believed, that unripe grain possesses properties which render it to a certain extent unfit for the food of man.
It is for the most part difficult to trace satisfactorily the operation of the poisons now alluded to, because they are seen acting only in times of famine and general distress, when it is not always easy to make due allowance for the effect of collateral circumstances. There is one poison of the kind, however, whose baneful influence has been so frequently and unequivocally witnessed, that no doubt now exists regarding its properties, I mean spurred rye, or ergot. It is a poison of no great consequence, perhaps, to the English toxicologist; for indeed I am not aware that a single instance of its operation has hitherto been observed in Britain.[[2446]] But its effects are so singular, and the ravages it has often committed on the continent have been so dreadful, that a short account of it cannot fail to interest even the English reader. Besides, it has lately been introduced into the materia medica, as possessing very extraordinary medicinal qualities; and since its use is gaining ground, every medical jurist ought to be conversant with its properties as a poison. I have also met with an instance where it was administered for the purpose of procuring miscarriage.
Of Poisoning with Spurred Rye.
Spurred Rye, or Secale cornutum, the Seigle ergoté, or Ergot of the French, and Mutterkorn, or Roggenmutter, of the Germans, is a disease common to various grains, in consequence of which the place of the pickle is supplied by a long, black substance, like a little horn or spur. It has been known to attack many plants of the order Graminaceæ;[[2447]] and among those used as food by man, it has been observed on barley, oats, spring-wheat, winter-wheat, and rye. But the rye seems peculiarly subject to it, almost all the poison which has caused epidemics, as well as what is now used in medicine, being produced by that grain.
Of the Cause and Nature of the Spur in Rye.—The spur attacks rye chiefly in damp seasons, and in moist clay soils, particularly those recently redeemed from waste lands in the neighbourhood of forests. Of all the places where the spur has been hitherto observed none combines these conditions so perfectly, and none has been so much infested with the disease, as the district of Sologne, situated between the rivers Loire and Cher, in France. According to the statistical researches of the Abbé Tessier, who in 1777 was deputed by the Parisian Society of Medicine to investigate the causes of the extraordinary prevalence of the ergot in that district, the country was then so much intersected by belts of wood around the fields, that the traveller in passing along might imagine he was constantly approaching an immense forest; the arable land was so poor, that, although it lay fallow every third season, it was exhausted in nine or twelve years at farthest, and then remained a long time in pasture before it could again bear white crops; the surface was so level, and consequently so wet, that crops were obtained only when the seed was sown on the tops of furrows a foot high; and the climate is so moist, that from the month of September till late in spring the whole country is overhung by dense fogs.[[2448]] Here the rye, the common food of the peasantry, appears to have been in Tessier’s time more liable to be attacked by the spur than in any other part of the continent. Tessier found, that after being thrashed it contained on an average about a forty-eighth part of ergot, even in good seasons; but in bad seasons, and taking into account a considerable proportion which is shaken out of the ears and sheaves before they reach the barn, the proportion of ergot in the whole crop has been estimated so high as a fourth or even a third. In Sologne the disease was farther observed by Tessier to be always most prevalent in the dampest parts of a field, and to affect above all the first crop of fields redeemed from waste land, or from land which had previously been for some time in pasture.[[2449]] The same connexion between moisture and the development of the ergot has been repeatedly traced in other parts of France, as well as in Germany.[[2450]] And according to the experiments of Wildenow, it may be brought on at any time, by sowing the rye in a rich damp soil, and watering the plants exuberantly in warm weather.[[2451]]
Opinions are much divided as to the cause and nature of the spur. It had been conceived by some that nothing else is required for its production but undue moisture combined with warmth; and that under these circumstances the spur is formed simply by a diseased process from the juices of the plant.[[2452]] By others, such as Tillet, Fontana, and Réad, who also consider it to be simply a diseased formation, it has been held to arise from the germen being punctured when young by an insect;[[2453]] and in support of this statement, General Field says he saw flies puncture the glumes in their milky state where spurs afterwards formed, and imitating the operation with a needle obtained the same result.[[2454]] On the other hand, Decandolle, reviving a previous doctrine that the spur is a kind of fungus, conceived he had given strong grounds for believing this excrescence to be a species of sclerotium, which he terms S. clavus. Wiggers supports this doctrine by chemical analysis; for he endeavours to show that the basis of the structure of the spur is almost identical in chemical properties with the principle fungin.[[2455]] Lastly, the most recent researches, those of Smith,[[2456]] Queckett,[[2457]] and Bauer,[[2458]] founded chiefly on microscopical observations, tend to a union and modification of these two views,—namely, that the great mass of the spur is a peculiar morbid formation, and that the whitish bloom which covers fresh specimens consists of a multitude of microscopic fungi in the form of sporidia, which thickly envelope and impregnate the parts of fructification in the nascent state of the embryo, and are in all probability the exciting cause of the morbid degeneration of the pickle.[[2459]]
Various opinions have been formed as to the mode of propagation of the spur. Fontana has alleged that one variety of it may spread from plant to plant over a field; and that he has expressly transmitted it by contact from one ear to another.[[2460]] His opinion and statement of facts are at variance with experiments lately made by Hertwig, a German physician, who found that even when the ear while in flower was surrounded for twelve days with powder of spurred rye, the healthiness of the future grain was not in the slightest degree affected.[[2461]] The same results have also been obtained by Wiggers, and more recently by Dr. Samuel Wright.[[2462]] Wiggers, however, although he could not produce spurs in the way indicated by Fontana, observed that the white dust on the surface of the spurs will produce the disease in any plant, if sprinkled in the soil at its roots, appearing therefore to be analogous to the sporules or spawn of the admitted fungi. Mr. Queckett has made the most precise experiments on the mode of reproduction of the disease. He succeeded in infecting rye repeatedly with ergot by means of the sporidia developed on the spurs; but it is remarkable that he could not in the same way infect wheat or barley.[[2463]]