Causes: wet fermented food, cryptogams, bacteria, sprouted green
potatoes, sand, irritants, hot food, frosted food, ill health,
starvation, anæmia, siliceous plants, diseased teeth or salivary
apparatus, parasites, calculi, specific inflammations. Symptoms:
depraved appetite, licking soils, walls, filth, etc., clammy mouth,
red bordered tongue, eructations, colic, rumbling, tympany, icterus,
costive, coated fæces, tender hypochondrium, anorexia, emaciation.
Lesions: stomach full or nearly empty, pyloric sac congested, mucosa
thickened, petechiated, with excess of mucus and desquamated
epithelium, cells swollen opaque, congested duodenum, pale yellow
liver, with excess of pigment in cells, also in urine, ruptured
stomach, hemorrhagic infiltrations. Treatment: careful dieting,
laxative, stomachics, pepsin, antiferments, bitters, ipecacuan.
_Causes._ This is a much less common affection in horses than dogs and
is usually charged on some fault in diet. Fodders that have been badly
harvested or wet from any other cause and are musty, dusty, rusty, or
covered with any irritant or poisonous cryptogams or bacterial ferment,
sprouted oats, or potatoes that have become green by exposure to the
sun, sand and gravel in the grain, irritant plants like ranunculus,
euphorbium, veratrum, etc.; cooked food given too hot, or vegetable food
given frosted; putrid water, and indeed all the causes of indigestion
tend to produce gastric catarrh. Weakness of the stomach and gastric
functions from any cause is a concurrent factor. Thus extensive
inflammations and violent fevers, prolonged abstinence, starvation,
anæmic and parasitic affections, the action of frozen food on the
viscus, are to be feared. A horse which has been for a week or more
without food is extremely subject to such attacks unless fed with the
greatest caution at first. Irritant plants like carex, equisetum, etc.,
which act mechanically by reason of the contained silica, food
imperfectly masticated on account of disease of the jaws, teeth or
salivary glands, parasites like spiroptera and bots and phosphatic and
oat-hair calculi, act mechanically. Finally certain affections like
petechial fever, influenza, pneumonia, pustulous stomatitis and horse
pox may develop local foci of inflammation in the stomach. When once
started, microbian infection tends to maintain and aggravate it.
_Symptoms._ These are very indefinite, depending very much on the
complications. Some loss or perversion of appetite, a licking of the
soil or walls, eating litter, filth and even manure, a clammy mouth, a
redness along the margin of the tongue, eructations or attempts to
eructate, or actual vomiting, colicy pains which are usually dull until
the bowels are implicated, more or less rumbling in the bowels,
sometimes icterus, in other cases tympany, and nearly always tardy
passage of hard and scanty mucus-covered fæces. The colics may be
intermittent, appearing only just after food is taken, or they may be
continuous, the animal pawing incessantly hour after hour. A slight
hyperthermia and a distinct tenderness of the epigastrium and left
hypochondrium to pressure are valuable symptoms. Percussion causes even
keener suffering.
If the gastric contents are abundant and fermentation active, death may
ensue from gastric tympany. In other cases, the persistence of colics at
the time of feeding, of impaired appetite, constipation and loss of
condition are the main symptoms. In the last named cases the patient may
die of marasmus.
_Lesions._ In cases terminating in fermentation and fatal tympany the
stomach is full; in other types it is empty of all but water, mucus, and
perhaps some irritant contents, or decomposed food. The alveolar mucosa
of the right sac and above all of the pylorus is red, congested,
petechiated, macculated, thickened to double its normal thickness or
more, thrown into rugæ, and covered with tenacious mucus. This mucus is
highly charged with detached epithelial cells, and at different points
the mucosa is abraded by their desquamation. The epithelium generally
shows swollen, opaque cells. The red congested spots show active
engorgement of the capillaries, and this is especially marked around the
glandular follicles, with more or less formation of embryonic cells. The
duodenum is often implicated with similar lesions of the mucosa and its
epithelial layers, which may block the orifices of the pancreatic and
especially of the biliary duct. In this case there is a yellowish
discoloration of the liver, excess of pigment in the hepatic cells, and
hemorrhagic spots in the liver and even in the kidneys. The urine may be
yellow or reddish brown from the presence of bile or blood pigment. In
ruptured stomach, spiroptera, bots, and other irritants, we find their
characteristic lesions, and in petechial fever there is excessive and
partly hemorrhagic infiltration of the mucosa and submucosa. In
protracted cases ulcers may be present on both stomach and intestine.
When it is a localization of some specific fever the characteristic
lesions of that affection will be found.
_Treatment._ If appetite continues, diet should be restricted to a very
moderate allowance of green food, pulped roots, bran mash, boiled
flaxseed, boiled middlings, with pure water or whey. If there are
irritants in the stomach they may be got rid of by a laxative (aloes 4
drachms, or sulphate of soda ½ pound). Sodium bicarbonate (½ drachm 2 or
3 times daily) is desirable to stimulate peptic secretion and check acid
fermentations. Pepsin (2 drachms) should be given at equal intervals.
Fermentations should be checked by the use of salol (1 to 2 drachms),
naphthalin (1 to 2 drachms), benzo-naphthol (1 to 3 drachms), or calcium
salicylate (2 drachms).
In this connection bitters are of value to improve the tone of the
gastric mucosa, nux vomica, gentian, quinia and quassia in combination
with ipecacuan giving good results.