In which disease does it cause excitement?—It depends on the idiosyncrasy, on the habit of body, if I might use a common term.
Having taken it on the Saturday and Sunday night, and having been free from nervous excitement on the Sunday and Monday, what would you assume judging from the result?—If it were opium, yet it is only presumed to be opium, it appears to have soothed him.
And why, when the man was tranquil on the Sunday and Monday, did you, after that, venture to say that these pills irritated him?—I do not mean to say they did.
Re-examined by Mr. Serjeant Shee—You stated that, though you had seen no case of epileptic convulsions with tetanic complications, your reading informed you that there had been, and you mentioned Dr. Mason Goode?—Yes. He is a well-known author on the subject of convulsions. There is a class of convulsions called epileptic—not, strictly speaking, epilepsy—though they resemble it in some of its features. Epilepsy, properly so called, is sudden in its attacks. The patient falls down at once with a shriek. Within my knowledge, the disease constantly occurs at night and in bed.
Are the convulsions which the authors do not class as properly epilepsy, but as convulsions of an epileptic character, sometimes attended with premonitory symptoms?—Sometimes the patient is thrown into tetanic and tetaniform convulsions. Pending the struggle or the convulsions, actual epilepsy may come on in this way, and the patient die. In epilepsy and in convulsions of an epileptic character, a patient may have suffered in the night and be well the next morning, and as well the next day as if he had had no fit at all, more especially where adults are seized for the first time. When an adult is seized for the first time it is in my experience that several fits follow each other during a short period.
If it were true that Cook’s mind appeared distressed and irritable the afternoon before he died, would you infer from that, considering the former excitement and elation, he was in a state of depression or not?—Yes.
What would you infer from what happened in the middle of the Sunday night, supposing it were true that he represented himself to be mad for ten minutes, and it was occasioned by a quarrel in the streets?—That he had been seized with some sudden cramp or spasm.
W. M‘Donnell
Supposing there was no such cramp, and that he meant to tell the truth, would you refer what he said to any nervous and mental excitement?—Yes, decidedly.
With regard to the spots on the stomach, which you mentioned when my friend was examining you, you stated you differed from some gentlemen of your profession?—Yes.