Page:Treatise on poisons in relation to medical jurisprudence, physiology, and the practice of physic (IA treatiseonpoison00chriuoft).pdf/495

 violent constitutional excitement, quickly passing to a state resembling typhoid fever. Sometimes the inflammation spreads steadily towards the trunk from the part to which the poison was applied; sometimes the inflammation around the injury is trifling and limited, but a similar inflammation appears in or near the axilla, and subsequently on other parts of the body; and the latter form of disease is always attended with the highest constitutional derangement and with the greatest danger.

Another singular poison, unequivocally the product of disease, and which acts as a local irritant, is the flesh or fluids of animals affected at the time of their death with a carbuncular disorder, denominated in Germany Milzbrand, and analogous to the pustule maligne of the French. The disease, so far as I know, has not received a vulgar name in the English language, being fortunately rare in Britain. It is a constitutional and epidemic malady, which sometimes prevails among cattle on the continent to an alarming extent, and is characterized by the eruption of large gangrenous carbuncles on various parts of the body. This distemper has the property of rendering the solids and fluids poisonous to so great a degree, that not only persons who handle the skin, entrails, blood, or other parts, but even also those who eat the flesh, are apt to suffer severely. The affection thus produced in man is sometimes ordinary inflammation of the alimentary canal, or cholera; more commonly a disorder precisely the same as the pustule maligne; but most frequently of all an eruption of one or more large carbuncles resembling those of the original disease of cattle. It is often fatal. The carbuncular form has been known to cause death in forty-eight hours. It is an interesting fact, for the knowledge of which we are indebted to M. Dupuy, that the carbuncle of cattle may be caused by applying to a wound the blood or spleen of an animal killed by gangrene of the lungs.

A poison analogous to the former in its nature, which has sometimes occasioned severe and even fatal effects in man is the matter of glanders, a contagious disease to which the horse is peculiarly subject, and which is communicated probably by means of a morbid secretion from the nostrils. This disease has been propagated to man by infection; at least instances have been related where grooms attending glandered horses, although they had no external injury through which inoculation could take place, were attacked with profuse fetid discharge from the nostrils, a pustular eruption on the face, and colliquative diarrhœa, which has sometimes ended fatally in a few days. In other instances inoculation of the hand with the blood of the glandered horse has produced alarming diffuse inflammation, and a carbuncular eruption.

It appears probable, that some peculiar circumstances with which we are not yet acquainted must concur with the operation of the