Treatise on Poisons by Sir Robert Christison

OF COMPOUND POISONING. Having now investigated the three great classes of poisons in their relations to physiology, practice of physic, and medical jurisprudence, it will be necessary to offer a few observations on a subject of considerable medico-legal importance, which has been almost overlooked in systems of Toxicology,—Compound Poisoning. When two poisons of different or opposite properties are administered about the same time in poisonous doses, the effects of the one may overpower and prevent the operation of the other, or they may merely modify the action of one another. In this manner the usual symptoms produced by one or by both may be entirely or in a great measure wanting; and even in the dead body the usual appearances occasioned by one or both may be modified or perhaps altogether absent. Although in the course of reading I have met with a sufficient number of cases of the kind to show that compound poisoning is an object of some consequence to the medical jurist, the facts hitherto made public are not so numerous as to render a systematic arrangement of them practicable. The most advisable course, therefore, seems to be merely to describe for the present the cases which have been brought under my notice. These are as follows: