286 EFFECTS OF MEDICINE ON HOUSES. 
nulations from them are rising beyond the level of the surface, and 
have a blackish aspect : the discharge is diminished. 
10 111. — Continue the drench morning and evening. 
11th. — The appetite is improving : the ulcers have run into one 
common sheet of ulceration. To take his drench thrice a-day. 
12/A.— Use six drachms of the arum in the decoction. 
13/A. — Two ounces of the arum to be boiled in each drench, and 
given twice a-day. 
14/A. — Our stock of medicine is exhausted. Latterly it seems 
to have been, in the form and doses in which it has been admi- 
nistered, all but devoid of effect. 
The Spanish Fly or Blister Beetle. 
( Cantharis Vesicatoria.) 
CASES I. & II. — Spanish flies were first given to horses by way 
of experiment, under the direction of Mr. Coleman and my father, 
so long ago as 1804. Two horses having subacute glanders were 
the subjects of the first experiment, the symptoms in neither 
of them being urgent. They commenced taking (the large doses 
of) two drachms of the powdered flies daily. On the sixth day, 
in one of them, alarming symptoms presented themselves : all 
appetite had forsaken him ; he manifested on a sudden excessive 
prostration of strength, broke out in violent perspirations, had no 
pulse to be felt, and speedily sank and died. 
The other horse, on the day following, was attacked with similar 
alarming symptoms, of which he likewise sank and died. Both 
subjects were observed to pass, during the time they were taking 
the flies, large fluxes of urine. 
The post mortem appearances were — kidneys, though expected 
to be found changed, not observably altered in aspect; bladder in a 
highly vascular condition, and particularly so in the horse that died 
last, with its cavity contracted to that degree that its sides were in 
contact, and it appeared less in volume than in the ordinary empty 
state in health. In the longest survivor the stomach likewise pre- 
sented marks of inflammation, though not of that intense character 
exhibited by the bladder. 
In some subsequent experiments with cantharides, their action 
appeared, to my father, to be principally on the bladder. 
CASE TIL — In this instance a decoction of cantharides was given 
— made by boiling an ounce of the powdered flies in a pint and a 
half of water down to a pint — to a mare having a muco-purulent 
flux from her nostrils, with some remains of submaxillary tume- 
faction, in the dose of two fluid ounces, morning and evening, in a 
pint and a half of infusion of linseed. 
