Have you any instance a fortnight afterwards?--It is quite within the range of possibility.
Would epilepsy, with tetanic complications, set in from that cause? Do you mean to stand there, as a serious man of science, and tell me that?--Yes, the results of sensual excitement--chancre in one of them, and syphilitic sore throat.
Did you ever hear or know of such a thing as chancre or any other form of syphilis producing epilepsy?--Not epilepsy, but tetanus. You are forgetting the tetanic complications.
If I understand it rightly, it stands thus: the sensual excitement produces the epilepsy, and the chancre produces tetanic complications?--You are quite mistaken. I say the results of a sensual excitement.
You have just now said that your reason for thinking and referring it to epilepsy was that, amongst other things, an hour or an hour and a half intervened between the taking of the poison and the appearance of the first symptoms. Do you mean that in your reading you have not met with cases quite as long as that when the death has arisen from strychnia?--I cannot recollect where death has followed.
Would the fact of morphia having been given for an hour or two previously in any way touch your opinion with regard to poison?--No; I have seen opium bring on convulsions very nearly the same.
Will opium bring on convulsions?--Yes, but a different form of convulsions from epilepsy.
Because opium brings on convulsions, you assume in this case that morphia accelerated the disease?--Drawing the inference, I should say it might.
Suppose not a case of epilepsy, but of strychnia; what would be the action of morphia? How would it attack the disease?--In some cases it stimulates. It is exceedingly apt to cause congestion of the brain.
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.