Important: Safety Warning
This page contains a formula or preparation using substances now known to be dangerously toxic, such as arsenic, mercury, lead, or cyanide compounds. Exposure to these substances can cause severe poisoning, permanent injury, or death.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Strychnine
in chemistry, formula, C21H2N2O2, strychnia, a highly poisonous alkaloid, discovered in 1818 by Pelletier and Caventou in St. Ignatius' beans, and shortly afterward in Nux vom- ica seeds. It is obtained, together with brucine, by boiling Nux vomica seeds in dilute sulphuric acid till they become soft, crushing the seeds, and adding to the expressed liquid an excess of calcium hydrate, which throws down the two alkaloids. On washing with cold alcohol, brucine is dissolved, leaving strychnine in an impure state. When pure, it crysin an impure state. When pure, it crys- tallizes in colorless, tetragonal prisms, having a very bitter, and somewhat meabsolute alcohol, and ether, but soluble absolute alcohol, and ether, but soluble in spirit of wine and chloroform. The symptoms are very marked, and comin spirit of wine and chloroform. The symptoms are very marked, and com- prise violent tetanic convulsions, laborious respiration, from the tightening of the chest mu muscles, spasmodic contraction of the heart, and rigidity of the spinal column. These are succeeded by a short calm, after which they are again repeated till death or progress toward two hours after taking the poison.
STUART FAMILY natives; the wood is used for carts, agricultural implements, and building. S. spreading, red hairs, and five-nerved toxifera, the Guiana poison plant, is a acuminate leaves. It furnishes the chief climber, with a stem covered with long, ingredient of the poison called woorali, them. It yields another deadly poison. S. ligustrina is said by Blume to furnish tical, acuminate, three-nerved, glabrous leaves, with simple tendrils opposite to them. It yields another deadly poison. pseudoquina, a Brazilian tree about 12 feet high, has a corky bark (said to be given in Java in paralysis of the lower extremities and as an anthelmintic. S. pseudoquina, a Brazilian tree about 12 feet high, has a corky bark (said to be equal to cinchona as a febrifuge), and short-stalked, ovate, quintuple-nerved leaves; all parts of it are intensely bitter except the fruit, which is eaten by children. The fruit of S. colubrina, a large Indian climbing shrub, is esteemed by the Telegus as an antidote to the bite of the cobra. The fruit of S. innocua is eaten in Egypt.