Misuse

“ Bunglers that you are, don't use arsenic or any mineral poison; they leave traces; you will be found out. Use vegetable poisons; poison your fathers, poison your mothers, poison all your families, and their inheritance will be yours—fear nothing; you will go unpunished! You have committed murder by poisoning, it is true ”

“ It is indeed high time that the medical profession raised, with one accord, its voice in solemn protest against the use of all nerve-obtunding and felicity producing drugs, which are all, without exception, toxic agents, working mischief and only mischief in the human body."—Dr. ”

“ For my subject matter, as I proceed in the fulfilment of my task, will now lead me to consider her in the light of being the producer of various noxious substances as well; in consequence of which it is that we are in the habit of charging her with our crimes, and imputing to her a guilt that is our own. She has produced poisons, it is true; but who is it but man that has found them out? ”

“ They poison people, but the dearest grocer gave me a list of all the safe things, made up by a regular committee that tells how much poison each thing has in it, so you can know right off, or alcohol either. ”

“ Substances which Nature never intended for the food of man have come to form a principal part of our diet; caustic spices torture our digestive organs; we ransack every clime for noxious weeds and intoxicating fluids; from twenty to thirty-five per cent, of our breadstuffs are yearly wasted on the distillation of a life-consuming fire; vegetable poisons, inorganic poisons, and all kinds of indigestible compounds enslave our appetites, and among the Caucasian nations of the present age an unexampled concurrence of causes has made a passive submission to that slavery the habitual condition. ”

“ This tendency to alter under special conditions is common to human beings, in whom hunger, syphilis, trauma, and, still more frequently, morbid conditions inherited from insane, criminal, or diseased progenitors, or the abuse of nerve poisons, such as alcohol, tobacco, or morphine, cause various alterations, of which criminality—that is, a return to the characteristics peculiar to primitive savages—is in reality the least serious, because it represents a less advanced stage than other forms of cerebral alteration. ”

“ No skill can prevent the effects of daily poisoning; and no man can prolong his life beyond a short standard, where every meal ought to have its counteracting medicine.
Devoted to disease by baker, brewer, grocer, wine-merchant, spirit-dealer, cheesemonger, pastry-cook, confectioner, &c. the physician is called to our assistance; but here again the pernicious system of fraud, as it has given the blow, steps in to defeat the remedy: even the physician’s prescription is adulterated! ”

“ Were I to summarize the arguments against the saying, that “what is meat for one is poison for another,” I would put it something like this: Its author, and the people, have been deceived in that one person can bear what another can not. Some constitutions have withstood the worst habits—violations of all the known laws of life—gluttony, intemperance to the degree of almost constant drunkenness, the grossest and most constant immorality in departments the most exhausting, until passed what we call old age—and still have rounded out a full century of life. ”

“ The idea included under the word autointoxication in our time—that is, that the human body has a tendency to produce poisons within itself, which act deleteriously on it and must be eliminated—was a favourite one during the Middle Ages. ”

“ Much of it, I am convinced, is due to the administration of poison, but a great deal more is effected by suggestion; and, to my mind, there is little difference in the measure of guilt of one who hits his enemy on the head with a club, and of him who secretly gives a poisonous drug and causes death by physical means, or of him again, who, by acting on a man’s fears, administers a moral poison to the mind and frighten his victim to death. ”

“ Or, which is rather worse, do you, directly or indirectly, live by poisoning others, by encouraging the immoderate use of those refreshments which, if taken to excess, disorder the reason, ruin the soul, and prove no better than slow poison to the body? If your business calls you to buy or sell, do you use falsehoods? ”

“ The same evening the grocer or grocers, druggist or druggists, come and say, `It was I who sold the arsenic to the gentleman;' and rather than not recognize the guilty purchaser, they will recognize twenty. Then the foolish criminal is taken, imprisoned, interrogated, confronted, confounded, condemned, and cut off by hemp or steel; or if she be a woman of any consideration, they lock her up for life. ”

“ Under these conditions of modern civilization a small quantity goes a long way. Besides, society is to-day reaping the harvest of its abuse of this drug during a long period, in the shape of a diathesis which manifests itself in various ways and under many forms of disorder. ”

“ What would be said of a man who introduced poison in any degree into the food or drink of his child? Is the poisoning of the household atmosphere by the ignorant, thoughtless, or selfish smoker morally more defensible? ”

“ The whole farrago of quack or patent medicines is destructive of health and life, whether cordial or vegetable balsams, tinctures, syrups, or elixirs,—pectoral or antiscorbutic drops, bile or antibilious pills, tonic or digestive wines, balms of gilead, guestonian embrocations, Leake’s pillula salutaria, and a thousand other poisonous and life-destroying trash. ”

“ No denunciation of drugs, as sparingly employed by a wise physician, was or is intended. If, however, as Dr. Gould stated in his “valuable and practical discourse” to which the Massachusetts Medical Society “listened with profit as well as interest,” “Drugs, in themselves considered, may always be regarded as evils,”—any one who chooses may question whether the evils from their abuse are, on the whole, greater or less than the undoubted benefits obtained from their proper use. ”

“ These five narcotising and intoxicating poisons are used, more or less, by half the people in the world, giving some considerable pleasure at times, but destroying, more or less, the health of all who use them, and gradually stunting the form and otherwise undermining the well-being of the entire human race. ”

“ But where the poison is introduced into the system so insidiously that the subject is unconscious of its absorption until its effects are produced, then it is not a question of antidotes, but the problem is, How shall we counteract its consequences, and how shall we keep our patients alive until the life-destroying agents have ceased to put in jeopardy the vital powers? ”

“ If your writings win, you are a teacher of millions. So, in order to reach the public ear, you may cater to the tastes and wishes of the majority.
8. If you see some vile conditions of humanity, send out, in your writings, vials of vileness. “Like cures like.” If any part of the church cries, “poison, poison!” you may justify yourself by the fact that the so-called “poison” in your productions will only neutralize the poison so prevalent in society, on the same principle that poison is administered to a sickly body in order to effect a cure. ”

“ After the poison which she had taken began to operate, she raved like a maniac, tearing the clothes from her body in handsful, attempting to lay hold of and bite every thing within her reach, and cursing God and the hour that gave her birth. ”

“ Every one can see how true this is in regard to evil habits which destroy health, reason, and life, such as the prevailing use of tobacco and the drinking of intoxicating drinks. If a man drinks thoughtlessly, without knowing any better, he can be taught and shown that it is wrong and a sin to drink poisonous fluids which are entirely unnecessary, and which endanger health, reason, life, and the welfare and happiness of all associated with him, and actually destroy vast multitudes of those who drink them moderately. ”

“ When, however, through either organic disease or functional inactivity, they fail to carry off their proportion of the waste-products of the body, some of these products must either be eliminated through other organs, where they cause irritation and disease, or be retained within the body, where they act as poisons. ”

“ But a word of warning may serve to restrain those who are only at the beginning of this downward path of which the end is positive and certain. The use of drugs once begun is sure to increase until, stupefied by their action, the victim becomes a sot, unfitted for work and a burden to himself, his relatives, and his friends. ”

“ And, inasmuch as it is so, is it not a great detriment at least to our health to carry this mass of filth around with us, from day to day, from week to week, and from year to year—absorbing its poison back into the circulation? ”

“ He who employs poison to do any injury, not fatal, to a man himself, or to his servants, or any injury, whether fatal or not, to his cattle or his bees, if he be a physician, and be convicted of poisoning, shall be punished with death ”

“ Instances of which are but too common among the lower Class of the People, who much too frequently confide themselves to the Conduct of ignorant Men-slayers: In all such unhappy Accidents, I say, we should treat these unfortunate Persons, as if they had been actually poisoned, by violent corroding Poisons, (See § 533) that is, we should fill them, as it were, with Draughts of warm Water, Milk, Oil, Barley-water, Almond Milk, emollient Glysters with Milk, and the Yolks of Eggs; and also bleed them plentifully, if their Pains are excessive, and their Pulses strong and feverish. ”

“ Cases in which one man injures another by poisons, and which prove fatal, have been already discussed; but about other cases in which a person intentionally and of malice harms another with meats, or drinks, or ointments, nothing has as yet been determined. ”

“ It is a misdemeanour to administer any poison, or destructive or noxious thing, merely to aggrieve, injure, or annoy an individual. For a working definition we may state that a poison is a substance which, when introduced into or applied to the body, is capable of injuring health or destroying life. A poison may therefore be swallowed, applied to the skin, injected into the tissues, or introduced into any orifice of the body. ”

“ But is it not a crime then, never sufficiently to be reprobated, to commit deliberate and greater evil, merely with the hope of seeing some good arise out of it?—Or is that man in his senses, who entrusts poison to every hand, exposes it at every mart, suffers it to be carried about oh all occasions, aye, and to, become a necessary ingredient of every cup, because an antidote may be afterwards procured which chance may render effective? ”

“ By these symptoms the disease of the poison-habit may be identified in all its disguises, for the self-deception of the poor lady who seeks relief in a cup of the same strong tea that has caused her sick headache is absolutely analogous to that of the pothouse sot who hopes to drown his care in the source of all his misery, or of the frenzied opium-eater who tries to exorcise a legion of fiends with the aid of Beelzebub. ”

“ For if, on account of those bad effects which we bring upon ourselves by eating and drinking, we deem it necessary for the health of the body to make use of some unpleasant and painful drug, sometimes even, if the nature of the disease demand, requiring the severe process of the amputating knife; and if the virulence of the disease shall transcend even these remedies, the evil has at last to be burned out by fire ”

“ Recall further, that all disease is produced by influx from the hells, either through man's active evils into his body, or into conditions therein existing from hereditary or imparted disorder; that certain drugs introduced into the human system do produce morbid states similar in their symptoms with those of disease, because evil spirits corresponding to them have in them a plane of influx through which they can operate. ”

“ Amongst us a simpleton, possessed by the demon of hate or cupidity, who has an enemy to destroy, or some near relation to dispose of, goes straight to the grocer's or druggist's, gives a false name, which leads more easily to his detection than his real one, and under the pretext that the rats prevent him from sleeping, purchases five or six grammes of arsenic -- if he is really a cunning fellow, he goes to five or six different druggists or grocers, and thereby becomes only five or six times more easily traced ”

“ For as a certain physician observed, those are not the only poisons which are prepared by the medical art, but such things as we daily receive for food, as well liquid as solid, are to be reckoned among this number; and much greater danger arises to our life from these, than to our bodies from poisons. ”

“ One may become ill, poisoned, through inhaling the perfume of a flower which to another may afford exquisite enjoyment. Another may become ill, poisoned through the aura of an animal whom another will unharmed fondly caress. Thus, the fact is apparent that poisons, per se, do not exist, but that under certain conditions all qualities are inimical to physical existence.
Gentola—As you are aware, doctor, many persons with impunity consume alcoholics and narcotics sufficient in quantity to kill one unaccustomed to their use. ”

“ Pleasurable as may be the stage of excitement or intoxication, fascinating as may be the dreams that follow, the evil effect upon the body is rapid and decisive.
Wasting of the muscles, sallowness of the skin, hebetude of the mind, interference with coördination, failure of the appetite, convulsive seizures, loss of strength, and idiotic offspring, seem, from all accounts, to be the uniform result of the long continued use of this drug. ”

“ It is only when they find their proper food, decaying matter, that they begin to multiply, and in that act they secret a poison, toxin, which is absorbed, and, entering the circulation, causes in the individual a special class of symptoms peculiar to that toxin, or poison. ”