AUTOPSY CASE-REPORT OF A RARE ACUTE IATROGENIC WATER-INTOXICATION WITH A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

This paper reports a rare autopsy case, a 21-years old healthy female worker, who died of acute iatrogenic water intoxication after she had swallowed powder scraped off 17 matches in an apparent suicide attempt . Gastric lavage was performed as she was wrongly considered to have t aken poison containing phosphorus. She was given 7.8 1 water within 2 h. The pathological findings and 16 cases from the literature between 1978-1994 are reviewed.