ULCERATION OF THE COLON. 
87 
colon, and thereby for a time prevented from having its full 
action on the mucous surface? or does such extensive ulcer- 
ation arise from some unknown but suspicious causes since the 
purging a week ago ? 
The practice of giving physic to hunters in the middle of the 
hunting season, is, to say the least of it, one by no means to be 
commended . The tone the body is in at the time, and the condition 
the bow'els are in, are both such as to call for augmented doses 
of medicine ; and it is very likely that this large dose of medi- 
cine has to encounter a distended colon — a colon stuffed with 
the best hay and corn and beans — the sudden and convulsive 
disturbance of which is likely to cause some irritation to the 
intestine. Supposing, however, such not to be the case, hardly has 
the physic subsided, than, the frost breaking, the hunter is 
called to perform the greatest possible exertion, and certainly at 
the risk of inducing disease in parts just now excited to inordi- 
nate action by highly irritative medicine — medicine that leaves 
behind it, probably for days, an irritability, a morbid sensitive- 
ness, which readily afterwards becomes converted into inflam- 
mation. The groom might not have been to blame. To inter- 
pret the case as it stands — taking it for granted that the tale 
told is in every point a veracious one — disease might have ex- 
isted — produced probably by prior physicking — in the colon; 
which the last dose only served to aggravate and extend to such 
a degree as to occasion death. The colon is a part very liable 
to chronic disease — to ulcerous disease in particular. The dysen- 
teric scouring which cows are subject to, has been found to 
proceed from old-standing ulceration. 
The case is, on the whole, better explained on the supposition 
of lurking disease of the colon, than on the suspicion of the 
unacknowledged administration of another physic ball. 
P. 
