Antidote to Opium.

Manawatu Herald, 19 April 1894, Page 3

Antidote to Opium.

A correspondent writes from New York — " It is scarcely possible to exaggerate .the sensation caused here by the aot of a young doctor, who claimed before an assembly of savants in this city to have discovered an infallible antidote for opium, tnotfpfine*; -and similar poisons. Despite the"pr6tests~of those present, who declared that they would not sanction certain suicide, he mixed three grains of morphia in two wine-glasses of water and drank them. Immediately afterwards he took four grains of permanganate of potash, similarly dissolved in water. The doctors who watched him for five hours expecting to see him die, seeing that one grain is a fatal dose, could detect no injury whatever to his constitution nor any effect from the poison, and he is now alive and well. Seeing that half the deaths due to poison are said to be caused by opium and its preparations, the importance of the discovery is enormous. The doctor happened upon the antidote in this way. He found that the permanganate in a wineglass promptly preoipitated the poisonous part of the morphine, removing entirely the well-known taste. He found that this ocourred with extraordinary rapidity, while the action of the permanganate on the albumen of an egg and on pepton, the two ingredients most closely representing the substances the antidote would meet with in the stomach, was 75,000 times more slow. He inferred that there was no danger that the wineglass test would fail when applied to the stomach, as tbe doctors had feared. He was sure that the action of the antidote would be so rapid as to ensure safety. The young man it Dr Moor, and be is the brother of the distinguished musiaian."