Medicine: Lethal but Laborious

If you are going to kill yourself, there are easier ways of doing it than by taking aspirin. That method normally involves swallowing 90 to 120 five-grain tablets—and keeping them down. About 50 Britons a year manage to do away with themselves this way. In the British Lancet, Dr. Philip Hopkins of Ilford, Essex, tells about a 31-year-old woman who took 250 tablets and lived.

Three hours after swallowing the stuff, she changed her mind about dying and walked into a hospital “sweating profusely, feeling hot, dizzy and anxious and much afraid of collapsing in the street.” She breathed fast, had a rapid pulse and ringing in her ears, soon became delirious. The doctors washed out her stomach, gave morphine and fluid by vein. Ten days later she was “normal except for some anxiety.”

Even this performance does not set a record: another patient once survived some 300 tablets. But the doctors got a stomach pump working that time before the drug could take effect.