Mrs. K——­ had a continued haemorrhage from her nose for some days; the ruptured vessel was not to be reached by plugs up the nostrils, and the sensibility of her fauces was such that nothing could be born behind the uvula.  After repeated venesection, and other common applications, she was directed to immerse her whole head into a pail of water, which was made colder by the addition of several handfuls of salt, and the haemorrhage immediately ceased, and returned no more; but her pulse continued hard, and she was necessitated to lose blood from the arm on the succeeding day.

Query, might not the cold bath instantly stop haemorrhages from the lungs in inflammatory cases?—­for the shortness of breath of those, who go suddenly into cold water, is not owing to the accumulation of blood in the lungs, but to the quiescence of the pulmonary capillaries from association, as explained in Section XXXII. 3. 2.

II.  The other kind of haemorrhage is known from its being attended with a weak pulse, and other symptoms of general debility, and very frequently occurs in those, who have diseased livers, owing to intemperance in the use of fermented liquors.  These constitutions are shewn to be liable to paralysis of the lymphatic absorbents, producing the various kinds of dropsies in Section XXIX. 5.  Now if any branch of the venous system loses its power of absorption, the part swells, and at length bursts and discharges the blood, which the capillaries or other glands circulate through them.

It sometimes happens that the large external veins of the legs burst, and effuse their blood; but this occurs most frequently in the veins of the intestines, as the vena portarum is liable to suffer from a schirrus of the liver opposing the progression of the blood, which is absorbed from the intestines.  Hence the piles are a symptom of hepatic obstruction, and hence the copious discharges downwards or upwards of a black material, which has been called melancholia, or black bile; but is no other than the blood, which is probably discharged from the veins of the intestines.

J.F.  Meckel, in his Experimenta de Finibus Vasorum, published at Berlin, 1772, mentions his discovery of a communication of a lymphatic vessel with the gastric branch of the vena portarum.  It is possible, that when the motion of the lymphatic becomes retrograde in some diseases, that blood may obtain a passage into it, where it anastomoses with the vein, and thus be poured into the intestines.  A discharge of blood with the urine sometimes attends diabetes, and may have its source in the same manner.

Mr. A——­, who had been a hard drinker, and had the gutta rosacea on his face and breast, after a stroke of the palsy voided near a quart of a black viscid material by stool:  on diluting it with water it did not become yellow, as it must have done if it had been inspissated bile, but continued black like the grounds of coffee.