§ 55. =Accidental, Suicidal, and Criminal Poisoning.=--Deaths from sulphuric acid are, for the most part, accidental, occasionally suicidal, and, still more rarely, criminal. In 53 out of 113 cases collected by Böhm, in which the cause of the poisoning could, with fair accuracy, be ascertained, 45·3 per cent. were due to accident, 30·2 were suicidal, and 24·5 per cent. were cases of criminal poisoning, the victims being children. The cause of the comparatively rare use of sulphuric acid by the poisoner is obvious. First of all, the acid can never be mixed with food without entirely changing its aspect; next, it is only in cases of insensibility or paralysis that it could be administered to an adult, unless given by force, or under very exceptional circumstances; and lastly, the stains on the mouth and garments would at once betray, even to uneducated persons, the presence of something wrong. As an agent of murder, then, sulphuric acid is confined in its use to young children, more especially to the newly born. There is a remarkable case related by Haagan,[65] in which an adult man, in full possession of his faculties, neither paralysed nor helpless, was murdered by sulphuric acid. The wife of a day-labourer gave her husband drops of sulphuric acid on sugar, instead of his medicine, and finally finished the work by administering a spoonful of the acid. The spoon was carried well to the back of the throat, so that the man took the acid at a gulp. 11 grms. (171 grains) of sulphuric acid, partly in combination with soda and potash, were separated from his stomach. [65] Gross: _Die Strafrechtspflege in Deutschland_, 4, 1861, Heft I. S. 181. Accidental poisoning is most common among children. The oily, syrupy-looking sulphuric acid, when pure, may be mistaken for glycerin or for syrup; and the dark commercial acid might, by a careless person, be confounded with porter or any dark-looking medicine. Serious and fatal mistakes have not unfrequently arisen from the use of injections. Deutsch[66] relates how a midwife, in error, administered to mother and child a sulphuric acid clyster; but little of the fluid could in either case have actually reached the rectum, for the mother recovered in eight days, and in a little time the infant was also restored to health. Sulphuric acid has caused death by injections into the vagina. H. C. Lombard[67] observed a case of this kind, in which a woman, aged thirty, injected half a litre of sulphuric acid into the vagina, for the purpose of procuring abortion. The result was not immediately fatal, but the subsequent inflammation and its results so occluded the natural passage that the birth became impossible, and a Cæsarean section extracted a dead child, the mother also dying. [66] _Preuss. Med. Vereins-Zeitung_, 1848, No. 13. [67] _Journ. de Chim. Méd._, tom. vii., 1831.