INFLAMMATION OF THE C(ECUM. 
139 
was covered with cold sweat, exhaling that peculiar odour, 
sui gene?is, belonging to sick horses, and which practitioners 
immediately recognize. The nose, ears, and extremities were 
cold ; the pulse wiry, small, hard, and quick ; the matter evacu¬ 
ated had covered the tail and the thighs ; it was fluid, of a brown 
colour, and had more the appearance of human excrement than 
as proceeding from a mare. 
1 immediately diagnosticated gangrenous enteritis, and pre¬ 
dicted a fatal and speedy issue. I proposed to bleed her, in 
order to develope the pulse, which was almost imperceptible ; and 
also to act as a useful derivative. The blood was thick and 
black, and flowed gently down the neck. We had great diffi¬ 
culty in abstracting two pounds, which, after standing in a vase, 
presented a coat of a dirty grey colour, five or six lines in thick¬ 
ness, supported by a clot that had scarcely the consistence of 
currant jelly. The application of large vesicatories to the 
thighs and the sides of the chest being resolved on, I made in¬ 
cisions into the skin in a lozeno-e-hke form, and these wounds 
were thickly covered with blister ointment; and I predicted that 
the patient would not live four hours, if, in the mean time, con¬ 
siderable swelling did not take place. My prognosis was 
rigorously fulfilled ; and I believe it is a general observation in 
acute diseases that the issue will be fatal when the skin seems 
to have lost its sensibility, and stimulating applications have 
no effect upon it. A decoction of linseed, and in which poppy- 
heads and belladonna leaves were infused, was prepared, in order 
to be administered, both in injection and by the mouth. Our 
cares, however, were fruitless; the blisters did not rise, and the 
mare died at about the expiration of the predicted time. She 
was immediately opened, in the presence of MM. Jarryon and 
Giguet, my colleagues in the regiment. 
The thoracic viscera were perfectly sound, and the cranium 
presented nothing unusual. In the digestive organs there were 
the following morbid appearances :—the small intestines and the 
rectum were sound ; but the mucous membrane, and the mucous 
membrane alone of the large intestines, was sphacelated through 
its whole extent; its colour was of a deep black brown, but here 
and there were points and patches of a decided black colour, 
while the membrane generally was covered by a thick and 
granulous mucus resembling a coat of mud. These morbid ap¬ 
pearances were confined to the origin and termination of the 
large intestines, where they commenced and broke off suddenly. 
The liver presented nothing unusual except its jjale pink colour, 
and the little adherence of its pleural covering, that might be 
raised with perfect case from the parenchyma, which was easily 
