This is most common as an irregular form of strangles, the abscess forming in connection with the mesenteric glands or on the walls of the intestine. Small abscesses may also implicate the mucous glands or Peyer’s patches as a result of catarrhal enteritis. Less frequently an abscess forms in the seat of the puncture of the colon for tympany, or in connection with blows, kicks, punctures with stable forks, nails and other pointed objects. Foreign bodies entering with the food and the cysts of the larvæ of the sclerostomata will also give rise to suppuration.
These abscesses may attain a large size, especially in strangles, and involve adhesions between the bowel and other viscera, or the walls of the abdomen. Or they may be small like peas or beans scattered along the coats of the intestine or between the folds of the mesentery. They may be inspissated to the consistency of thick cream or rich cheese, and they may rupture into the intestine, through the abdominal walls or into the peritoneum. In the last case infective peritonitis sets in usually with fatal results.
Symptoms. These are generally obscure. There may have been noticed a rigor, and there are always marked indications of ill health, dullness, lack of spirit or appetite, dryness and erection of the hair, hide bound, insensibility of the loins to pinching, colics after meals, tenderness of the abdomen, tympany, groaning when lying down or rising, when turned around short, or when walked down hill. Sometimes the abscess can be distinctly felt by the hand in the rectum. When it implicates the abdominal walls there is usually a diffuse phlegmonous swelling, at first soft and pasty, then firm and solid, and finally softening and fluctuating in the center. Sometimes there is the evacuation of pus by the anus or of the investing membrane of the abscess, and this may be expected to herald recovery. In case of infective peritonitis there are the usual symptoms of stiff movement, the bringing of the feet together under the belly, abdominal tenderness, trembling, hyperthermia, cold ears and limbs, cold perspirations, great dullness and prostration, small, weak or imperceptible pulse, hurried breathing and gradual sinking.
Treatment. This is most favorable when the abscess approaches the surface so as to be punctured through the abdominal walls. In other cases it is so situated that it can be punctured with trochar and cannula through the rectum. In such a case it may be evacuated and injected with a nontoxic antiseptic, the puncture and injection being repeated as wanted. In the internal and deeply seated abscesses we must seek to support the general health, give pure air, easily digestible and nourishing food, and agents that may be hoped to retard suppuration. Hyposulphite of soda in ½ oz. doses, or sulphide of calcium in scruple doses, may be repeated two or three times a day.
ULCERATION OF THE INTESTINES.
Symptom or sequel of other disease, or from traumas, caustics, neoplasms, peptic ulcers, verminous thrombosis, tubercle. Catarrhal erosion, peptic, deep, round ulcer, calculi with irregular ulcers, cord ulcer at mesenteric attachment, small, follicular, grouped ulcers, sloughing ulcers of infectious diseases, circular projecting, button like ulcers of hog cholera, microbes. Symptoms: diarrhœa, black, or red, sloughs, fever, blood stained vomit, manipulation. Treatment: for foreign body, poison, or infectious disease, careful diet, antiseptics.
Ulceration of the intestines is commonly a symptom or sequel of other intestinal disorder, such as intestinal catarrh, impaction, calculus, foreign body, parasites, petechial fever, influenza, glanders, rinderpest, Southern cattle fever, hog cholera, pneumoenteritis, rabies, canine distemper. Then there are ulcers, caused by sharp pointed bodies, by caustic agents ingested, and by obstructive changes in neoplasms. Peptic ulcers may occur in the duodenum as in the stomach. Finally local disturbances of the circulation and especially such as attend on verminous thrombosis, are at once predisposing and exciting causes of ulceration. Tuberculosis and other neoplasms are additional causes.
The ulcers may vary in different cases. In catarrh there is usually superficial desquamation of the epithelium, and erosions rather than deep ulcers. The peptic ulcer forms on the dependent wall of the gut, where the gastric secretions settle, and assumes a more or less perfectly circular outline (round ulcer). Those due to calculus or impaction, may be irregular patches mostly on the unattached side of the intestine and resulting from necrosis of the parts most exposed to pressure. The ulcers resulting from cords stretched along inside the bowel, are in the form of longitudinal sores on the attached or mesenteric side of the intestine, where the wall being shorter the cord continually presses. Follicular ulcerations are usually small, deep excavations, commonly arranged in groups. Ulcers connected with neoplasms have an irregular form determined by that of the morbid growth. In infectious diseases the ulcers are round or irregular, resulting from circumscribed sloughs. In most of the infectious diseases the tendency appears to be to attack the intervals between the folds of the mucosa, probably because the bacteria of ulceration find a safer lodgement in such places. In the hog cholera ulcers the older ulcers tend to the circular form with thick mass of necrotic tissue in the form of plates or scales imbedded in the bottom and projecting above the adjacent surface of the mucosa. As a rule the microbes which in the different cases preside over the necrobiosis are found in the depth and walls of the ulcers.
The symptoms are largely those of the diseases of which the ulcers are a concomitant or result. There is usually diarrhœa, which is generally black from extravasated blood, and may be marked by fresher red bloody striæ. Sloughs of variable size are not at all uncommon in the fæces. Hyperthermia is usually more intense than in ordinary chronic enteritis, indicating the action on the heat producing centres of the necrosing microbes and their toxins. In pigs and dogs there may be vomiting of dark blood stained material or of feculent matter. In the small animals it may be possible to feel through the walls of the abdomen the thickening of the intestine at and around the seat of any extensive ulcer.
Treatment. So far as this is not the treatment of the foreign bodies, poisons, or specific fevers which cause the ulcers, it consists mainly in careful dieting and the use of antiseptics such as subcarbonate of bismuth, salol, salicylic acid, sodium salicylate or naphthol.