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.[156] 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.[157] 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.[158] 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.[159] Perhaps cholera arising thus may prove fatal. The following extraordinary case, which appears to have been of this nature, was communicated to me by the late Dr. Duncan, junior. A bookbinder in this city, previously in excellent health, rose one morning at six to kindle his fire, and took a large draught of cold water from a pitcher used in common by the whole family. He went immediately to bed again, complaining of pain in the pit of the stomach, and extreme anxiety, and affected with incessant vomiting. In twelve hours he died without any material change in the symptoms, and no disease whatever could be detected in the dead body. Dr. Duncan satisfied himself from general circumstances, that poisoning was quite out of the question; so that, however extraordinary it may appear, his death could be accounted for in no other way than by ascribing it to the cold water.—Hoffmann says he was acquainted with instances where fatal inflammatory fever was induced by drinking too freely of cold water, and a suspicion of poisoning in consequence excited.[160]