Symptoms of different lesions of kidneys and constitutional states, of poisoning by irritant plants, common on moors and in woods. In puerperal cow fed on turnips raised on mucky, unreclaimed, sour lands. Bacteria. Toxins. Anæmia. Poor wintering. Limed new soils. Symptoms: in plethoric, congested mucosæ, vascular tension, hurried breathing, colics, straining, red urine; in vegetable irritants, depression, weakness, coldness, trembling, stiffness behind, scanty red or black urine, diarrhœa, constipation; in anæmia, poverty, debility, red urine, pink tinge in milk, emaciation, hidebound, anorexia, colics. Chronic or intermittent. Lesions: in plethoric, congested enlarged kidney, without softening; in irritant poisons, congestion also of throat, stomachs, intestines, liver with hæmorrhagic extravasations; in anæmia, kidneys pale, flaccid, hydroæmia, liver enlarged, softened, reddish liquids in serous cavities. Treatment: avoid the injurious soils, drain, cultivate, feed products of such soils with other food, oleaginous or saline laxatives, antiferments, tonics, astringents, flax seed, farinas.
The passage of blood or blood elements in the urine.
Causes. A symptom of a variety of diseases, producing lesions of the secreting structures of the kidneys; acute congestion, tumors, calculi, parasitism. Also as a manifestation of diseases of distant organs—hæmoglobinuria, southern cattle fever, anthrax, poisoning by irritant diuretics, wounds of the bladder, pelvic fracture with injury to bladder or urethra, cystitis with varicose cystic veins, etc.
Among the irritant plants charged with producing the affection are the young shoots of oak, ash, privet, hornbeam, alder, hazel, dogberry, pine, fir, and coniferæ, generally. Also ranunculus, hellebore, colchicum, mercuriales annuus, asclepias vincetoxicum, broom, etc. The disease is common in spring in cattle turned out too early to get good pasturage and which, it is alleged, take to eating the swelling buds and young shoots of irritant plants.
The disease has occurred mostly in woods and wild lands and has accordingly been vulgarly named the wood evil, (maladie de bois, holzkrankheit), and moor ill.
In England, as occurring in the puerperal cow, Cuming, of Ellon, attributes it to a too exclusive diet of turnips. His analysis showed that turnips contained 10% sugar and 1 to 1½% vegetable albumen. The sugar is held to stimulate unduly the milk secretion, but fails to supply the nitrogenous materials needful to form it, and the cow is speedily rendered anæmic, with solution of the blood globules or of the hæmatin and its excretion by the urine. No attempt was made to produce hæmaturia by an exclusive or excessive diet of sugar, and cows fed on turnips grown on well drained lands never suffered from the disease.
Williams says that urine in such cases had a strong odor of rotten turnips. This argues not an anæmia determined by sugar, but rather an intestinal fermentation, perhaps superinduced by ferments introduced along with the turnips. Add to this the notorious fact that the offending turnips are usually such as are grown on wild, damp, undrained, swampy, or mucky lands, and we have the suggestion of a bacteridian poison, or a toxic product of bacteria. Williams and Reynal practically agree on the point that the common hæmaturia is the result of anæmia. It has long been noticed that the herds which suffer from the affection are those which have come out of the winter in low condition, the victim is the poor man’s cow, and the symptoms are most likely to appear when turned into the fields in spring before the pastures have come up. The anæmic condition of the carcasses is quoted in support of this view, but perhaps without making sufficient account of the extraordinary destruction of blood globules during the progress of the malady.
Pichon and Sinoir see in the liming of soils and the production of larger crops, a cause of anæmia in the rank and aqueous growth of the meadows, and their overstocking in order to eat them down, or to consume their products. They found that an abundant artificial feeding was the most efficacious mode of treatment.
Reynal, who endorses this view, tells us that in the anæmic and liquid blood the globules become smaller and can pass more readily through the walls of the vessels. But this is exactly the opposite effect from what we see when the blood is diluted with water. The globules in such a case are distended and enlarged, and may finally have their protoplasm and hæmatin dissolved and diffused through the liquid. If the blood globules are shrunken, then we must look for a cause very different from anæmia.
Reynal further assures us that plethora is a common cause of hæmaturia in cattle. “Under the prolonged influence of a very assimilable diet, the blood becomes more plastic, circulates with difficulty in the capillaries, and may even rupture them, with a resulting capillary renal hæmorrhage, and bloody urine.” He further intimates that this occurs especially in spring after the animals have been turned out on very rich pastures, and that in Normandy certain pastures of unusual richness are notorious for producing hæmaturia.