Foil for Suicides

There is small excuse for having bichloride of mercury tablets around the house nowadays as an antiseptic. There is even less excuse for swallowing the deadly blue tablets by accident. Some drug manufacturers make them coffin-shaped. Others put them in bottles with round bottoms or covered with sandpaper. One uses small wooden caskets. The adult who takes bichloride of mercury usually wants to die, is usually successful. But in future he may be thwarted by an antidote reported by Dr. Sanford M. Rosenthal of U. S. Public Health Service last fortnight in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

An ordinary tablet contains 7.5 grains of bichloride of mercury. One grain is usually enough to kill. Taken in solution, the tablets painfully sear the mouth and throat. Swallowed whole, they may cause no pain for 30 or 40 minutes, or twice that time if the victim's stomach is full. Then follow abdominal cramps, vomiting, frequent bowel movements. Soon the poison seeps to the kidneys, stops the flow of urine. Pain varies with the dose and individual but is usually not agonizing. Victims fall into a coma, die within 48 hr.

Ordinary treatment for such poisoning is gastric lavage, a purging of the stomach and intestines with quantities of milk and eggs. But it must be done quickly and at best one victim in four dies. Survivors often have permanently damaged kidneys. Dr. Rosenthal's antidote is sodium formaldehyde sulphoxylate, which changes the poison into less toxic mercurous compounds. It is administered through a stomach tube and intravenously. Dr. Rosenthal has saved every one of ten acutely poisoned humans, without appreciable kidney damage, hopes hospitals throughout the land will test his foil for suicides.

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