Colonial North America: Countway Library of Medicine

288

Materia Medica

Stimulants

in the perspiration, and this would lead us to believe it would enter the course of the circulation, which is my opinion. A nephew of Dr Booerhave gave opium to a dog and upon killing him found a preternatural accumulation of bile in the duodenum and gall bladder, the liver was also tinged with bile. Of the effects of opium on the animal functions, I shall now proceed to treat as brief as the subject will alow, it produces hilliarity and if be taken in large quantities, intoxication takes place, this however is an agreeable intoxication, it likewise occasions priapismus and a propensity to venerial pleasures, and this even in old people, of this Dr Haller and some others have been proofs, after sometime the effect subsides and is succeeded by weariness &c. And if the dose has been too large, rigors, vertigo, and convulsions succeed, such are the common though not the uniform effects of opium, death has been brought on by the use of Laudanum without being preceded by convulsions, I have seen two cases of persons having destroy'd them selves in this manner without having convulsions, it is said by some authors that when these convulsions are induced by an over dose of opium, they are of a peculiar kind, they are said in