_Present symptoms of the patient._—Having gained the necessary information with respect to the previous history of our patient, we are prepared to investigate the symptoms under which he at present labours, and to inquire into the circumstances of their accession, progress, order of succession, intensity, and duration. If this investigation be conducted with skill, we shall be enabled to form some opinion respecting the origin of the sufferings, and, perhaps, to distinguish the invasion of a spontaneous disease from the effects of acute poisoning: upon this latter point, however, we shall require the aid of much collateral information,[3] as _whether the patient has ever suffered in a similar manner at any previous period, or whether any part of his family or friends have experienced a similar attack at the present time_? If the reply to this latter query be in the affirmative, we may look for a common cause of the complaint, and be led to suspect that it may arise from the ingestion of some acrid matter. We should therefore proceed to discover _the nature of the meals last taken as to quantity and quality_; the practitioner should, at the same time, pay particular attention to the state of the different persons affected, and to the existence or absence of vomitings and stools. The following case, reported by _Morgagni_, and quoted by _Orfila_ & _Foderé_, may be introduced as affording good illustrations of those points of inquiry, whose importance we are anxious to enforce. “In the month of May, 1711, four persons, that is to say, a priest, two women, one of which was his sister-in-law, and another person, all in good health, and on a journey, stopped at an inn to dine. Setting out on their road after dinner, the priest in a short time felt himself so ill in his bowels, that he was obliged to dismount from his horse. Notwithstanding the copious evacuations, both upwards and downwards, the pain increased every moment, and it was necessary to take the patient back to Céserne, the place where they had dined, and where the priest arrived half dead. A medical man who was called in, thinking he had only to deal with an ordinary cholic, employed a number of fomentations, glysters, purgative draughts, and anodynes; although he saw that one of the women had also strong evacuations with pains and faintings, and that the other person complained of pains and of a weight at the stomach, he never suspected the presence of a poison, because the other woman had no complaint, and the landlord protested with many imprecations, that there was nothing dangerous in his dishes; however, the evacuations saved the patients, and as they diminished a little next morning, it allowed of their removing into the neighbourhood of _Morgagni’s_ residence, whom they immediately called in. This great physician having ascertained whether there was any dish at the table of which the woman who was in good health had not eaten, and having found that it was a great dish of rice which had been first served up, concluded from this circumstance that it was this dish that contained the poison. The difficulty however, was, that the priest who had eaten the least, and who had been on the whole extremely abstemious, was precisely the person who had suffered the most, and the soonest; that the woman, who had eaten more than the priest, had been less sick than he; and that the other person, who had eaten more than all the rest, was the one who was the least incommoded.”