CHAPTER XXIV.
OF POISONING BY DISEASED AND DECAYED ANIMAL MATTER.
Another and much more important group of poisons, that may be arranged in the present order, comprehends animal matter usually harmless or even wholesome, but rendered deleterious by disease or decay. These poisons are formed in three ways, by morbid action local or constitutional, by ordinary putrefaction, and by modified putrefaction.
Of Animal Matter rendered Poisonous by Diseased Action.
Under the first variety might be included the latent poisons by means of which natural diseases are communicated by infection, contact, and inoculation. Such poisons, however, being usually excluded from a strict toxicological system, the only varieties requiring notice are the animal poisons engendered by disease, and which do not produce peculiar diseases, but merely inflammation. Several species of this kind may be mentioned, comprehending the solids and fluids in various unhealthy states of the body.
One of these poisons, contained in the blood and perhaps in some of the secretions of overdriven cattle, arises under circumstances in which the body seems to deviate little from its natural condition. A good account of the effects thus induced has been given in an essay on the subject by Morand.[[1545]] From the cases he describes it follows, that the flesh of such animals is wholesome enough when cooked and eaten; but that if the blood or raw flesh be applied to a wound or scratch, nay even sometimes to the unbroken skin, a dangerous and often fatal inflammation is excited, which at times differs little from diffuse cellular inflammation, and at other times consists of a general eruption of gangrenous boils, the pustules malignes of the French. The deleterious effects occasionally observed to arise from offal are probably analogous in their nature and their cause. On this subject Sir B. Brodie has made some remarks which tend to show that the application of various kinds of offal to wounds, and especially pricks of the fingers with spiculæ of bone from the hare, may cause an obstinate chronic erysipelas of the hand.[[1546]] I have met with a case of this nature, where the affection was erratic erythema of the hand.
Another species of poison, allied to the preceding in its effects and equally obscure in its nature, includes certain fluids of the human body after natural death, which are probably modified, if not even formed altogether, by morbid processes during life. Such poisons are the most frequent source of the dreadful cellular inflammation, often witnessed as the consequence of pricks received during dissection by the anatomist. On this interesting but obscure subject, much minute information will be found in the works quoted below.[[1547]]
It is still a matter of question among pathologists what these poisons are, and in what circumstances they spring up. By some their baneful properties have been suspected to arise from the operation of particular diseases on natural or morbid secretions;[[1548]] and although the precise diseases inducing these properties, and the precise fluids which acquire them have by no means been satisfactorily ascertained, it appears well established that no fluid possesses them more frequently or in a higher degree than the serum effused into the cavities of the chest and belly by recent inflammation of the serous membranes of these cavities. By others the origin of the poison is suspected to be wholly independent of diseased action in the living body and to lie merely in certain changes effected in healthy secretions by decay. And as the accidents produced by this poison have occurred chiefly during the dissection of bodies recently dead, it is supposed to exist only for a short time at the commencement of decay, and to disappear in the farther progress of putrefaction.
But whatever may be its nature and origin, we are well enough acquainted with its effects; which are diffuse inflammation and 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;[[1549]] more commonly a disorder precisely the same as the pustule maligne;[[1550]] but most frequently of all an eruption of one or more large carbuncles resembling those of the original disease of cattle.[[1551]] It is often fatal. The carbuncular form has been known to cause death in forty-eight hours.[[1552]] 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.[[1553]]
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.[[1554]] In other instances inoculation of the hand with the blood of the glandered horse has produced alarming diffuse inflammation, and a carbuncular eruption.[[1555]]