The repetition of the blister is often useful, the healing process going on simultaneously in the blistered surface and the diseased lung by virtue of nervous sympathy.
To complete recovery a course of vegetable tonics, such as gentian, nux vomica, calumba, may be given with iodide of potassium for a week or more. Constipation occurring during convalescence must always be corrected by food, (bran mashes, linseed gruel), injections, or oleaginous, saline, or aloetic laxatives. The greatest care should be exercised to secure pure air, comfort, sunshine, good grooming and general hygiene, and to prevent over-exertion during convalescence.
In the subacute types of pneumonia the fundamental difference in the treatment consists in the avoidance of all depressing remedies and the employment of stimulants and a supporting diet from the beginning. Sweet spirits of nitre and liquor of the acetate of ammonia, carbonate of ammonia or salammoniac with digitalis and strychnia may be used from the first. Vegetable tonics may be resorted to at an early stage, peroxide of hydrogen, and when expectoration is established and the fever moderated even mineral tonics may be employed. Nourishing gruels, mashes, roots, green food, and scalded oats may be used in turn to coax the appetite and not to satiate. In other respects the treatment is the same as for the acute. This form of the disease is liable to prove obstinate and persistent, and there appears to be a greater tendency to complications and so-called metastasis, as enteritis, laminitis or rheumatoid affections of the back or limbs. These when they occur must be treated as if they had arisen in ordinary circumstances, having regard meanwhile to the remaining inflammation in the lungs, for that has not necessarily been quite superseded but only alleviated.
Chronic Pneumonia. This has been described but if uncomplicated by consumption it appears to be usually only that consolidation of lung, due to the organization of exuded products into fibrous tissue, which occasionally forms a sequel of acute inflammation of the lungs. In such cases an access of circumscribed local congestion is liable to result from over-exertion, or a chronic state of irritation is maintained attended with more or less fever, inappetence, mal-assimilation, and often in the long run hectic, under which the animal is worn out. In such cases the chief indications are to avoid overwork or any undue strain upon the breathing organs, to support the patient by nourishing and easily digested food, and to control and remove any local irritation by measures indicated under the head of acute pneumonia.
CROUPOUS PNEUMONIA IN THE OX.
Subacute in many cases. Effect of temperament, and work. Acute form. Symptoms. Decubitus. Unfavorable symptoms. Prognosis. Suppuration frequent: indications. Gangrene. Colliquative Diarrhœa. Lesions, Comparison with those of lung plague. Tubercle. Treatment, bleeding, laxatives, refrigerant salts, derivatives, stimulants, tonics. Chronic form. Symptoms. Treatment.
In the large ruminants this disease tends more towards a subacute type than in the horse, and coming on insidiously from ordinary causes is liable to be confounded with the contagious pleuro-pneumonia of the bovine race. As in the horse the nervous animals show more violent symptoms. It is rare in milch cows and young cattle and more frequent in work oxen.
In the acute form the symptoms mainly agree with those of the horse. There is the same shivering, followed by a hot stage, hyperthermia, the accelerated pulse, the short quick labored breathing, heaving flanks, cough frequent, deep, hacking, and easily excited, dilating nostrils, redness of the mucous membrane, and the same indications on auscultation and percussion, care being taken to obviate misconception of natural conditions in the chest of the ox. There is in addition a dry muzzle, tenderness of the back and breast bones and wincing when they are pinched between the fingers and thumb; suspension of the appetite and rumination and in cows suppression of the secretion of milk; the mouth is often opened and the tongue protruded to facilitate breathing, and in bad cases each expiration is accompanied by a moan or grunt. In many cases the ox can lie on his flattened breastbone and maintain the breathing process, but when the disease is severe he stands no less obstinately than the horse, his elbows turned out, his nose protruded and directed towards a window or other opening.
Among the unfavorable symptoms may be mentioned increasing anxiety and distress, a more oppressed breathing, the animal standing constantly in one position with legs apart, elbows turned out, his nose extremely raised, nostrils widely dilating, mouth open, tongue protruded, the expiratory grunt deep and prolonged, the cough infrequent and so weak as to be almost inaudible, being rather like a forced expiration, and the pulse rapid, feeble or imperceptible. The prognosis is favorable in moderate cases subjected to early treatment.
The termination by suppuration is more frequent than in the horse. The general symptoms are ameliorated, appetite and rumination return though they remain capricious and irregular, there remains the double action of the flanks, the dry, rough muzzle, the tense, inelastic skin, frequently varying in temperature, the beast shivers at intervals, the cough is weak and often repeated, a yellowish thick discharge takes place from the nose, weakness and emaciation increases and the animal dies in from twenty to thirty days.