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Strychnine   Listen
noun
Strychnine  n.  (Chem.) A very poisonous alkaloid resembling brucine, obtained from various species of plants, especially from species of Loganiaceae, as from the seeds of the St. Ignatius bean (Strychnos Ignatia) and from nux vomica. It is obtained as a white crystalline substance, having a very bitter acrid taste, and is employed in medicine (chiefly in the form of the sulphate) as a powerful neurotic stimulant. Called also strychnia, and formerly strychnina.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Strychnine" Quotes from Famous Books



... some individuals—and those usually who are of quickest intelligence—display a somewhat quicker rate of rhythm, which may be as high as eleven per second. Moreover, it is found that by stimulating with strychnine any of the centres of reflex action, pretty nearly the same rate of rhythm is exhibited by the muscles thus thrown into contraction; so that all the nerve-cells in the body are thus shown to have in their vibrations ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes

... Of course, if a person is foolish enough (as many are) to drink sulphuric or nitric acid, his mouth and throat are burned as if he swallowed coals of fire, the former leaving black and the latter yellow stains; but when the poison is arsenic, or opium, or strychnine, the symptoms are very ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various

... the maid he found that she had her suspicions. She had found a vial on the table by the bed, about which she had said nothing. She knew her duty to a noble family, and held her tongue. She gave the vial to Lord Chetwynde, who recognized the presence of strychnine. The unhappy one had no doubt committed suicide. There was a letter addressed to him, which he took away. It was a long manuscript, and contained a full account of all that she had done, together with the most passionate declarations of her love. ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille

... Mongol horsemen on the best of his steeds overtook the wolves on the open plain and killed them with heavy bamboo sticks or tashur. A Russian veterinary surgeon taught the Mongols to poison wolves with strychnine but the Mongols soon abandoned this method because of its danger to the dogs, the faithful friends and allies of the nomad. They do not, however, touch the eagles and hawks but even feed them. When the Mongols are slaughtering animals they often cast bits of meat up into the air ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski

... Street set. The news of his cold-blooded crimes (transpiring in 1837) seem to have struck a deep horror among all the scoundrel's fashionable associates. Although when arrested in France it was discovered that Wainwright habitually carried strychnine about with him, he was only tried for forgery, and for that ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... Mechanics, a Manual of Geology," and numerous papers on Physics, Mathematics, Geology, etc. In November 1862 Darwin wrote to Sir J.D. Hooker: "Do you know whether there are two Rev. Prof. Haughtons at Dublin? One of this name has made a splendid medical discovery of nicotine counteracting strychnine and tetanus? Can it be my dear friend? If so, he is at full liberty for the future to sneer [at] and abuse me to his heart's content." Unfortunately, Prof. Haughtons' discovery has not proved of more permanent value than his criticism on the "Origin of Species." -on Bees' cells. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... red berries, and thus scatter the undigested seeds. The mice and the squirrels doubtless give them a wide berth, but in the crop of the fowl the seeds have the sting taken out of them. You cannot poison a hen with strychnine. ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs

... and told him that he ought to be ashamed of himself for trying to steal the meat of strangers. The lion, however, disregarding their addresses, only roared louder than ever, though he wisely kept outside the bright circle of the camp-fires. A little strychnine was placed on a piece of meat and thrown to him, after which he took his departure, and was never ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston

... person in the world to want a tonic. However, here is my prescription, if you must have it. Be very careful to take the right dose, because there's poison in it." The prescription contained three ingredients, strychnine, quinine, and nitro-hydrochloric acid; and the dose was fifteen drops in water. Mrs. Farnaby lit a match, and burnt the lines of her friend's writing. "As long ago as that," she reflected, "I thought of killing myself. Why didn't ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins

... virulent poisons have their remedial uses, Captain," he made reply. "You can kill a man with strychnine; you can put him in his grave with arsenic; you can also use both these powerful agents to cure and to save, in their proper proportions and in the proper way. The same rule applies to Ayupee. Properly diluted and properly used, it is one of the most powerful agents ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew

... of another day he immediately began preparations for the season's trapping. In two days' hunting he killed three caribou, his winter meat. Then he cut wood, and made his strychnine poison baits, and marked ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood

... MEANS, J.H. The effect of strychnine, caffeine, atropin and camphor on the respiratory metabolism in normal human subjects. Archives of Internal ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... handwriting he is in fearful danger. You despoil your own nature by such procedure more than you can damage any one else. Bowie-knife and dagger are more honorable than an anonymous pen sharpened for defamation of character. Better try putting strychnine in the flour barrel. Better mix ratsbane in the jelly cake. That behavior would be more ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage

... City suspected something wrong in the transaction. The City, by one of its mouths, asserted plainly that ladies' bills never meant business. George Vavasor cursed the City, and made his calculation about murdering it. Might not a river of strychnine be turned on round the Exchange about luncheon time? Three of the bills he left at last with his own bankers for collection, and retained the fourth in his breast-pocket, intending on the morrow to descend with it into those lower depths of ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope

... been boomed by various people, chiefly for financial reasons. Five or six of them are usually prescribed, with the addition of cod liver oil, and perhaps quinine, and (or) iron and strychnine, the complexity of the prescription being expected, apparently, to compensate for the ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... died in a few moments, and without regaining consciousness. The symptoms were suspicious, entirely foreign to any caused by the anaesthetic, and at the inquest the cause came to light. In the man's stomach was a large quantity of strychnine. That he knew something of medicine is certain, for the action of the alkaloid varies little, and he had the timing to ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... mercury, Arsenite of sodium, aa gr. iij. Sulphate of strychnine, gr. iss. Carbonate of potassium, Sulphate ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... one screech; and then turned head over heels backward, and fell down dead, one hundred and twenty-three of them at once. For why? The fairy had told the gamekeeper in a dream, to fill the dead dog full of strychnine; and so he did. ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley

... (scowl) and a glass (howl) and a toast (scoff) and a cheer (sneer); For all the good wine, and we 've some of it here! (strychnine and whiskey, and ratsbane and beer!) In cellar, in pantry, in attic, in hall, Long live the gay servant that laughs for us all! (Down, down with the tyrant that masters ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... will account for a burned finger. It is an argument from cause, and it is conclusive. Again, if a man severs his carotid artery, he will die. If the first proposition be supposed to be true, it will account for the man's subsequent death. Now, supposing a man takes strychnine, he will die. This is not quite so sure. If a stomach-pump were used or an antidote given, he might not die. The cause has been hindered in its action, or another cause has intervened to counterbalance the first. If, then, a cause be adequate to produce the effect, and if it act unhindered or ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... North,' says I, 'but I'm a plain man, and don't care for mural decorations. When you get the Isthmus all asphalted over with that boll-weevil prescription, would you mind giving me a dose of pain-killer, or a little strychnine on toast to ease up this feeling of ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry

... this all-year poison idea slide! You mark me—if you try that on you'll lose; more ways than one. I know 'em! A coyote will take a chance on guns and traps, but he's superstitious about these strychnine baits. After a few turn up on the range with a dose of it the rest will quit your line. Your traps won't show one catch. There's only one time to use it and that's after you've bait trapped and trail ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts

... about me at the hillside, with children playing and girls watching them, and tried to think of all the fantastic advantages an invisible man would have in the world. After a time I crawled home, took some food and a strong dose of strychnine, and went to sleep in my clothes on my unmade bed. Strychnine is a grand tonic, Kemp, to take the flabbiness ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells

... scoundrel, Goarly," said one of the Botseys. Then there was an indignant murmur heard, first of all from two or three and then running among the whole crowd. Everybody knew as well as though he had seen it that Goarly had baited meat with strychnine and put it down in the wood. "Might have pi'soned half the pack!" said Tony Tuppett, who had come up on foot from the barn where the hounds were still imprisoned, and had caught hold in an affectionate manner of a fore pad of the ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope

... looking-glasses in lacquered frames; beads of sorts, cowries and reels of cotton; pots of odorous pomatum and shea-butter nuts; feathers of the plantain-bird and country snuff-boxes of a chestnut-like fruit (a strychnine?) from which the powder is inhaled, more majorum, through a quill; physic-nuts (tiglium, or croton), a favourite but painful native remedy; horns of the goat and antelope, possibly intended for fetish 'medicine;' blue-stone, colcothar ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... Carter Handicap Poisoned," was the great, staring title. The details were meager; brutally meager. They were to the effect that some one had gained access to the Waterbury stable and had fed Sis strychnine. ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson

... little-known poison derived from the shell of the castor-oil bean. Professor Ehrlich states that one gram of the pure poison will kill 1,500,000 guinea pigs. Ricinus was lately isolated by Professor Robert, of Rostock, but is seldom found except in an impure state, though still very deadly. It surpasses strychnine, prussic acid, and other commonly known drugs. I congratulate you and yours on escaping and shall of course respect your wishes absolutely regarding keeping secret this attempt on ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various

... brass rod from which swung a velvet curtain. With his own hands the Lieutenant-Governor had taken away the fallen bottle, mopped up the pool of absinthe, and put the room to rights. Now he dismissed the negro, took from his pocket a little box of strychnine tablets, obtained from his physician on his way from the Capitol, and, after a brief survey of his surroundings to see that all was in order, went over to the divan and shook the sleeping man ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl

... (with enthusiasm). It is getting on simply splendidly. I sent the new Assistant out to take a little walk, so that he should not be in the way. There is Arsenic in the powder, HILDA, and Digitalis too, and Strychnine, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 25, 1893 • Various

... were totally depraved by nature and doubly defiled by a life of sin. There is, therefore, no necessity for total depravity, in order that man be in an utterly lost and helpless condition without Christ. A grain of strychnine is just as fatal as an ounce, without ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen

... I thought to myself; 'but they won't find Macumazahn. I have half a mind to put some strychnine into the carcases of those elephants for their especial benefit though.' I knew that they would stop to eat the elephants, as indeed they did, to our great gain, but I abandoned the idea of poisoning them, because I was rather ...
— Maiwa's Revenge - The War of the Little Hand • H. Rider Haggard

... decayed chocolate, ex-essence of beef, mixed dental preparations, aromatic spirits of ammonia, spirits of nitre, alcohol, arnica, quinine, ipecac, sal volatile, nux vomica and licorice water— with traces of arsenic, belladonna and strychnine. ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... you tried to kill me," Neil went on in cold, even tones. "I mean to say that you killed Birdsall, for all the Company believes he killed himself. You used strychnine in my case. God knows with what you fixed him. Now I can't hang you. You're too near dead as it is. But Twenty Mile is too small for the pair of us, and you've got to mush. It's two hundred miles to Holy Cross. You can make it if you're careful not to over-exert. ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London

... almost irritably, "you must be cured of that impression. I won't be considered 'good' when I'm not. Little you know about me, indeed! Good heavens, Captain Lane! what kind of women have you been accustomed to meet in the North? Would they put strychnine in a wounded Southerner's food, and give him heavy bread, more fatal than bullets, and read novels while dying men were at ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe

... an imposing array of metallic poisons such as arsenic, mercury, and bismuth. There were the commoner corrosives—nitric, hydrochloric, phosphoric, and sulphuric acid. And there were the poisons distilled or extracted from various sources, among which were strychnine, formic acid, ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley

... wild pig which devastated the crops. When the corn was standing, peasants sat up all night drumming on petroleum tins around the fields to drive off beasts. There were enough wolves also to harry the flocks. An Austrian official killed ten in one night with strychnine during my visit. But the natives complained bitterly that the Government did not permit them to shoot wild beasts and did not keep ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith

... down at Joe and across at Ole by the car. "No, thank you. I should undoubtedly put strychnine in their coffee if they stayed, I should hate the sight of them so. I have some that I brought for the pack rats. No, I don't ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower

... drops of various sorts that were compounded himself in his own pharmacy. Dr. Jennings' patients generally recovered and had few or no complications. This must be viewed in contrast to the practices of his fellow doctors of that era, whose black bags were full of mercury and arsenic and strychnine, whose practices included obligatory bleeding. These techniques and medicines "worked" by poisoning the body or by reducing its blood supply and thus lowering its vital force, ending the body's ability to manifest the undesirable symptom. ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon

... and thought that a dose of 'dog-buttons,' or a taste of strychnine, administered with a tempting bit of cold steak, or a piece of fresh lamb, or a bone of mutton carefully dropped in his way, might have aided the operation. Be that as it may, whatever of debt may have existed between ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond

... time being. A few minutes of relaxation then gives rest. When the problem has been solved, the worker is rewarded with sweet slumbers. An occasional night of this kind of wakefulness does no harm, provided no such drugs as coffee, alcohol, strychnine ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker

... (Sarah was her daughter-in-law), was in possession of small savings, some forty pounds, which aroused the cupidity of the younger women. Their first attempt at murder was with metallic mercury. It rather failed, and the trick was turned by means of three-pennyworth of strychnine, bought by Sarah and mixed with the old lady's food. The murder might not have been discovered but for the fact that Sarah, who had gone to Canada, was arrested in Montreal for some other offence, and made a confession which implicated her husband and ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure

... hundred years Turkey had been kept alive in Europe by the sedulous attentions of the Physician Powers, who dared not let him die for fear of the stupendous quarrels which would instantly arise over his corpse. So there they all sat round his bed, and kept him alive with injections of strychnine and oxygen, and, no less, by a policy of rousing and irritating the patient. All through the reign of Abdul Hamid they persevered: Great Britain plucked his pillow from him, so to speak, by her protectorate of Egypt; Russia tweaked Eastern Rumelia from him; France deprived him of his hot-water bottle ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson

... unwholesome to devour with greedy delight all sorts of details about his neighbors' business seems as hopeless and useless as to point out to the currie-eater or the whiskey-drinker the bad effects of fire and strychnine upon mucous membranes. The diseased palate craves what has made it diseased,—craves it more, and more, and more. In case of stomachs, Nature has a few simple inventions of her own for bringing reckless abuses to a stand-still,—dyspepsia, ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson

... suspect, nor conject, sir: I know. The man is poisoned, the substance strychnine. Now stand out of the way you gaping gabies, and let me work. Hy, young Oxford! you are a man: get behind and hold both his arms for ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... words he rose, and opening a tightly closed flask he dropped some strychnine on the nose and in the mouth of the rabbit, which immediately ceased to breathe. Then he laid it in a box and said, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... under by the current. A short time ago a respectable man, a chemist in Holloway, fifty years of age, driven hard to the wall, tried to end it all by cutting his throat. His wife also cut her throat, and at the same time they gave strychnine to their only child. The effort failed, and they were placed on trial for attempted murder. In the Court a letter was read which the poor wretch had ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... which he bore about in a leather case in his pocket. I trust that he may not remember any of the answers which I gave him that night. Holmes declares that he overheard me caution him against the great danger of taking more than two drops of castor oil, while I recommended strychnine in large doses as a sedative. However that may be, I was certainly relieved when our cab pulled up with a jerk and the coachman sprang down to ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Europe, resentment in such cases seldom goes further than vague verbal outbursts of temper. We accuse Mrs. Jones of misdemeanours with damp sheets; but we don't get so far as to accuse her of tricks with strychnine. In the Middle Ages, however, the pursuit of the scapegoat ran a vast deal further. When any great one died—a Black Prince or a Dauphin—it was always assumed on all hands that he must have been poisoned. True, poisoning may then have been a trifle more frequent; ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... development of these bacteria, yet the mortality from the disease was not due to the suppression of the act of breathing, but to the development of a poison by the bacteria which went into the circulation of the body and produced death, just as any poison, as strychnine, ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden

... carboethoxytannin, the latter on saponification yielding crystalline, inactive digallic acid. On acetylating pentacetyl leucotannin with acetyl chloride a hexacetyl derivative (M.P. 159 C.) is obtained, the strychnine salt of which is resolved into both of the active components. This proves the presence of digallic acid and leucotannin in tannin lev. pur. Schering investigated by Nierenstein. The latter author [Footnote: Liebig's Ann., 1912, 386, 318; 388, 223.] later considered tannin to be polydigalloylleucodigallic ...
— Synthetic Tannins • Georg Grasser

... States. It was suspected that the greatest hazard to direct seeding in or near forests would be rodents. Accordingly, in the spring of 1939 and 1940, 400 nuts and 600 nuts, respectively, were coated with a strychnine-alkaloid rodent repellent, and a comparable number of seeds, for both years, were left untreated to serve as checks. The checks were held in sphagnum moss at Beltsville, Md., and the nuts to be treated were packed ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various



Words linked to "Strychnine" :   nux vomica, alkaloid



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