106 
A SUSPICIOUS CASE OF POISONING. 
dial ball, and bled her. I was informed that, when she was 
walked out, she lost the use of her limbs, and fell down. 
The principal symptoms : — Great drowsiness — partial contrac- 
tion of the pupils when exposed to the external atmosphere — 
pulse 60 — slight perspiration. The nasal membrane very much 
reddened — frequently lying down and rolling, then getting up and 
eating a little — looks back at the loins, and swerves about as 
though she would fall down, there being a cerebral affection as 
well as a stomach one. 
I abstracted a gallon of blood from the temporal artery ; and, 
although the bowels are relaxed, I ordered an aperient and ene- 
mas, inserting a seton in the breast and blistering the poll. 
19^/i. — Pulse 50 : she eats a little — does not swerve so much 
— bowels relaxed : give febrifuges. 
20th. — Considerably worse— pulse 70. She is continually walk- 
ing round the stable, laying hold of the hay with the greatest 
avidity, then instantaneously dropping it from her mouth again 
and gnashing her teeth — the tongue furred. Sometimes she lies 
down at her full length, groaning — there are frequent liquid 
evacuations, more than would be caused by 3 iv of aloes : the 
colon is distended with flatus. These symptoms confirmed my 
opinion that it w 7 as not a complaint of common occurrence. 
She was too weak for me to repeat the abstraction of blood ; I 
therefore gave her opium and chalk ; I had likewise recourse to 
enemata, and fomentations to the abdomen. 
In the evening she appeared to want to stale. I examined the 
bladder, and found that viscus empty : the gruel, fomentations, 
and enemas, were ordered to be continued. At midnight the at- 
tendant left her comparatively easy, and very much better, as he 
supposed ; but between that time and the dawn of day she 
broke through the stable door and walked down the yard and 
fell into the river and was drowned. 
This was an unfortunate winding up of the affair, and, it being 
an interesting case, I wished a natural termination of it. I in- 
stituted a very scrutinizing post-mortem examination, and found 
every part of the body perfectly healthy, with the exception of 
two very important organs — namely, the brain and stomach. The 
villous coat of the latter was very much discoloured in the centre, 
but not corrugated, certainly not from any medicine given by me: 
the covering membranes of the brain and plexus choroides were 
distended with black blood. To cause this the animal must have 
had given her, by design or accident, some deleterious ingre- 
dient: what that poisonous agent was must remain a mystery, as 
the owner did not wish to implicate any one ; therefore I did not 
proceed to an analysis of the stomach and its contents. 
