Criminal Negligence by Christian Union

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 5, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 42.

Criminal Negligence.

By Christian Union

NOTHING, to the minds of careful people, is so astonishing as the reckless way in which some people care for the necessary poisons which are kept in every house. Instead of these being in a separate closet, or even on a separate shelf, from the simple remedies in the family pharmacy, they stand side by side, in bottles of similar shape, with the most harmless drugs. The result of this method is that at short intervals the daily papers record verdicts of "accidental poisoning." Not long since, a woman of intelligence and position took, in mistake for a mineral water which she was in the habit of taking each morning, a most deadly poison, and died in agony in a few hours. The poison had been put in a bottle which had formerly contained the mineral water. A nurse gave a three-months-old baby corrosive sublimate for potash, and the baby died after hours of intense suffering. A mother gave a daughter carbolic acid for a medicine left by a physician, and only by almost superhuman efforts was her life saved. In all these cases the suffering and deaths were caused by the criminal carelessness of the mother in allowing poisons in places to which all of the family had access.

Last week a woman took a paper of potash for sugar from a closet, and put it into the cups of coffee for her family. They all drank enough of the coffee to be made seriously ill. "Mistakes occur in the best regulated families," but no excuse can be offered for the carelessness that allows poisons in places where they are of easy access. Give them a special place under lock and key.—Christian Union.