occurred to himself. A young man, having just sat down, panting and bathed in sweat, after a severe match at tennis, drank greedily from a pitcher of water fresh drawn from a neighbouring pump. Suddenly he laid his hand on his stomach, bent forward, became pale, breathed laboriously, and in a few minutes expired.[1]
But when combined with exposure to a burning sun, as in hot climates, drinking cold water when the body is over-heated seems often to excite along with irritation in the stomach congestive apoplexy. Dr. Watts has given a good account of these effects as they occurred in the neighbourhood of New York during the hot season of 1818. During the summer of that year the thermometer often stood in the shade so high as 92°; and the labourers in consequence could not be restrained from drinking frequently and excessively of cold water. Many were attacked with pain in the stomach, sickness, giddiness, and fainting; next with difficult breathing, and rattling in the throat; then with apoplexy; and not a few perished.[2] These symptoms are very like the effects of some narcotico-acrid poisons.
Lastly, drinking cold water sometimes causes symptoms more nearly allied to those of the pure irritants. Thus some persons, on eating ices, or drinking iced-water, or cold ginger-beer in the hot days of summer, are attacked with violent colic. Others in the like circumstances are attacked with violent fits of vomiting.[3] Haller has even mentioned an instance of a man, who after swallowing a large draught of cold water while over-heated, was seized with symptoms of acute gastritis, and died in fifteen days: and in the dead body the stomach was found gangrenous and ulcerated at its fundus.[4] M. Guérard relates a similar case, that of a quarter-master who, swallowing iced-beer after a hurried journey in a hot day, was attacked in six hours with shivering, then with heat and tightness in the pit of the stomach, vomiting of every thing he took, anxiety, thirst and frequency of the pulse; next with extreme prostration, cessation of pain, hiccup, and lividity of the face; and he expired in five days. Signs of inflammation were found in the stomach, such as great redness internally, with spots of extravasation, and a blackish matter like what he vomited.[5] Cholera has also been sometimes referred to the same cause. In the hot summer of 1825 it was remarked that a great number of persons who used to frequent a particular coffee-house in the Palais-Royal at Paris, and the owner among the rest, were severely affected with cholera. Poison being suspected to be the cause, a judicial inquiry was instituted. It was proved, however, that similar accidents had been observed at other coffee-houses, in other cities, and likewise in former hot seasons; and when the whole medical evidence was referred to a commission of physicians and chemists, they gave their opinion, that the disease was owing to the incautious use of ices and iced-water in an unusually hot summer.[6]
