“Sarah, aged 10. One foot off at the ankle.
“Robert, aged 8. Both legs off below the knees.
“Richard, aged 4. Both feet off at the ankle.
“Infant, four months old, dead.”
The father was also attacked a fortnight after the rest of the family, and in a slighter degree—the pain being confined to the fingers of his right hand, which turned a blackish colour, and were withered for some time, but ultimately got better.
As a remarkable fact, it is specially noted that the family were in other respects well. They ate heartily, and slept soundly when the pain began to abate. The mother looked emaciated. “The poor boy in particular looked as healthy and florid as possible, and was sitting on the bed, quite jolly, drumming with his stumps.” They lived as the country people at the time usually lived, on dried peas, pickled pork, bread and cheese, milk, and small beer. Dr. Wollaston strictly examined the corn with which they made the bread, and he found it “very bad; it was wheat that had been cut in a rainy season, and had lain in the ground till many of the grains were black and totally decayed.”[604]
[604] In the Phil. Trans. for 1762 there are two strictly concordant accounts of this case; and in the parish church of Wattisham, there is said to be a memorial tablet, which runs as follows:—“This inscription serves to authenticate the truth of a singular calamity which suddenly happened to a poor family in this parish, of which six persons lost their feet by a mortification not to be accounted for. A full narrative of their case is recorded in the Parish Register and Philosophical Transactions for 1762.”
§ 585. Symptoms of Acute Poisoning by Ergot.—In a fatal case of poisoning by ergot of rye, recorded by Dr. Davidson,[605] in which a hospital nurse, aged 28, took ergot, the symptoms were mainly vomiting of blood, the passing of bloody urine, intense jaundice, and stupor. But in other cases, jaundice and vomiting of blood have not been recorded, and the general course of acute poisoning shows, on the one hand, symptoms of intense gastro-intestinal irritation, as vomiting, colicky pains, and diarrhœa; and, on the other, of a secondary affection of the nervous system, weakness of the limbs, aberrations of vision, delirium, retention of urine, coma, and death.