Broken wind : pneumarox / [Anon].

  • Clark, Bracy, 1771-1860
Date:
[1837?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Broken wind : pneumarox / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    PNEUMAROX. BROKEN WIND. ^Broken Wind is a disease frequently happening to horses. The following are the indi- cations which mark its presence. The breathing of the horse becomes altered from its natural state, and from an easy, gentle, and uniform respiration is changed to a painful, laborious heaving, and violent agitation of the flanks, which rise by several successive undulations to a preternatural height, then suddenly relax and fall downwards beyond the natural extent of these parts; the nostrils become dilated, and held rigid and opened to their utmost extent, and the face becomes everywhere emaciated and contracted. Such are the appearances in very aggravated cases; in more recent cases these appearances are less evident, and it is a disease that can exist in every degree of mildness or violence. When the disease has been of long standing, and little pains or care taken with the animal, as may be more particularly observed in cart horses, and horses employed in fann- er’s work in the country, the abdomen becomes large and pendulous; but in more recent cases, and in horses otherwise situated, we have observed that, in the early stage at least, the abdomen is rather contracted, and is painfully held up in this disorder. Great thirst attends this disease, arising perhaps from the increased action or fever which it occasions, and which has been too often mistaken for the cause of it, and has led to the most cruel privations. There is no disorder of the horse, perhaps, which has so much engaged the attention of anatomists, and of speculative ingenious men, as this, to discover its cause. It has, however, we believe, never yet been satisfactorily explained; at least, there is no author that we are acquainted with, that has formed any connected or probable account of it, unless perhaps very lately, and which was derived from the source we are about to mention. Haller seems to have supposed it proceeded from a relaxed or ruptured diaphragm. Lower imagined that a relaxation or injury of the phrenic nerves might occasion it; some have assured us, after examination, that the lungs are not at all affected in this complaint, and that its seat was about the larynx and air-passages ; and some of the writers on this subject have believed that the lungs were grown too big for the chest, and that this was the source of the mischief; and there have been many other conjectures equally absurd. Some thought they elucidated the nature of this disease by comparing it to a consumption, and others to an asthma. We trust something more natural and satisfactory will be found in the following statement of our observations on this singular disease. In the year 1795, being engaged in the dissection of a grey mare that was sent to the veterinary college to he destroyed on account of this complaint, on opening the chest, the lungs appeared free from inflammation, being very white; and, as this viscus appeared free from redness and increase of colour, the general concomitant of disease, we were led for awhile to consider the lungs as not the seat of the disorder, as others had done before • now several of the pupils were present at this dissection, and on cutting into then- substance no inflammation was perceivable : on examining them more closely, however, we observed a small bladder or vesicle on the outside of the lungs, in the external invest- ing pleuritic coat; this was conceived by some who were present to be a tubercle, and that tubercles might be the cause of the broken wind. Suspecting however, from its appearance, that it was not solid, but contained air, it was punctured by one of them hy my desire, and it immediately subsided. This instantly suggested to the writer of this article, that the lungs were actually in a state of emphysema, or in other words, that air was con- tained in a state of extravasation in then- substance, and which not only seemed evidently the case in this instance, but which we have since fully verified by the examination and dis- section of a considerable number of cases of broken wind, and found that in all it is the constant appearance. This extravasation of air into the substance of the lungs is perhaps