A similar accident is mentioned by Perleb, as having happened at Freyburg in the House of Correction. The inmates, soon after eating bread made with new flour, were attacked to the number of forty, with loss of speech and somnolency; and for some days afterwards they complained of sickness.[1] The accident was ascribed to darnel-grass. In a recent instance which happened in the workhouse of Beninghausen, and which was traced to the lolium, seventy-four people were attacked with giddiness, tremor, convulsions, and vomiting. Those who had led a dissipated life suffered most, and children least of all.[2]
Sometimes this poison appears to excite symptoms of intestinal irritation, without acting as a narcotic. A small farmer near Poicters in France saved five bushels of the seed from a field of wheat,—had it ground with a single bushel of wheat, and afterwards made bread with the mixture for his own family. He himself, with his wife and a servant, began to eat the bread on a Thursday; but the two last were so violently affected with vomiting and purging, that they refused to continue taking it. He persevered himself, however, till on the Sunday evening he became so ill that his wife wished to send for medical aid. This he refused to allow, and next day he expired after suffering severely from fits of colic.[3]
Bley of Bemburg has examined chemically the grain of lolium. He obtained from it a bitter extractive matter, without any characteristic chemical properties, but which killed a pigeon. The seed has a very feeble bitterish taste. Bley maintains that its poisonous properties are essential to it, and not incidental, as some think.[4]
Of the Effects of certain Poisonous Leguminous Seeds.
Among the injurious substances with which various grains are apt to be accidentally mixed from their growing together, two leguminous plants may be here shortly mentioned, as they have often been the source of disagreeable accidents on the continent.
In the department of the Cher and Loire in France, severe effects have been traced to bread made partly with flour of the Lathyrus cicera. M. Desparanches, in a report to the Prefect of the Department, says this flour occasionally forms one-half of that of which bread is made in some parishes; that it produces sometimes sudden incapability of walking, sometimes imperfect paraplegia and pain, with a draggling gait and turning in of the toes, and sometimes also slight convulsive movements of the thighs and legs.[5] Similar effects have been traced to this substance formerly. Virey says it has been known to produce in particular a singular stiffness and state of semiflexion of the knee-joint, compelling the individual to move the limbs in one rigid mass.[6]
The Ervum ervilia, or Bitter-vetch, which is not a native of this
