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...

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