Treatment. Induce emesis as in the dog. Give vinegar in case of alkaline poisoning. Follow this by a laxative if the irritants have gained the intestines, and finally a course of iron or bitters. Careful dieting is absolutely essential.
ACUTE CATARRHAL GASTRITIS IN THE HORSE.
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.