“SIR:—The case described by Mr. Braine, in your last week’s journal, of an unusual effect of subcutaneous injection, is what I have seen in two instances, but nothing like to such an alarming extent. One was in a gentleman whom I had injected several times previously, the other in a lady. I have also partly noticed it when I have injected myself. In the first case, a few minutes after the operation, the face became intensely flushed; this was followed by vomiting, and then a dead faint and struggling for breath, the pulse scarcely perceptible. These cases, and the effect on myself, taught me, when injecting a patient for the first time, never to give more than the sixth of a grain—wait a quarter of an hour longer, and then give the remainder of the dose, after ascertaining how the first injection was taking effect. Women, I have found, are generally bad subjects for subcutaneous treatment; for they get frightened and nervous—in fact, one woman told me that though the morphia taken by the skin did her more good than by the mouth, yet she preferred the latter, for the instrument frightened her. I have used my needle over three hundred times, and I have always noticed one fact, that if the wound bleeds after the operation the morphine enters the system much more powerfully and rapidly; and I always know when it is going to bleed, by the operation giving a good deal of pain. When this is the case I withdraw the instrument, to see if the puncture bleeds; if it does, I try a fresh place.” Bartholow,[26] in his useful and able little work, calls attention to this danger in these words: “In practicing the hypodermic injection it is important to avoid puncturing a vein. Serious depression of the powers of life, fainting and sudden and profound narcotism have been produced by injecting a solution of morphia directly into a vein. Fatal collapse might be induced by injecting air into a large vein, along with the solution.” Syncope, etc., as we have seen, from this cause, is common; narcotism rare, the drug seeming to exhaust itself in its initial action, or to produce a condition of the system in which narcotism is wholly or partially impossible. Dr. Corona[27] (_Giornale di Medicina Militaire_), summing up the results of his experiments on animals, says: “The injection of the two poisons (morphia and atropia) _into the veins_ showed that a much smaller dose was sufficient to produce rapid and grave poisoning, but even then the morphia produced its action instantaneously, and its action always superseded that of atropia.”