A contribution to comparative pathology : being a further inquiry into the reasons why the horse rarely vomits / by Joseph Sampson Gamgee.
- Sampson Gamgee
- Date:
- 1857
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A contribution to comparative pathology : being a further inquiry into the reasons why the horse rarely vomits / by Joseph Sampson Gamgee. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![going paragraph. Furthermore, he regarded the position of the stomach iieaj: the spine, and separated from the floor of the abdomen by the. intestines, as an obstacle to its being sufficiently compressed to reject its contents. But even this objection is frail; the act of parturition in the mare is one of great rapidity; abdominal respiration during disease or severe exercise is, in the horse, very easily effected j in the performance of these functions, and in the voidance of urine and faeces, the abdominal muscles take a very active part; and yet the uterus, bladder, and rectum are relatively as disadvan- tageously placed as the stomach with reference to the floor of the abdomen; the fact is, that the abdomen being com- pletely full, pressure is transmitted very effectively from its muscular walls to. the contained organs. Having thus examined and disproved the existence of the anatomical conditions which were said mechanically to impede regurgitant evacuation of the horse's stomach, 1 sub- mitted that as the mechanical part of the act of vomiting is excited by a reflex stimulus from the nervous centre, it behoved those who undertook to demonstrate why the horse rarely vomits, to study two classes of plienomena, the tiervoiis and the mechanical; for it is quite obvious that if the stimulus to the expulsive effort be wanting, it is useless to attribute the impossibility of the evacuation of the stomach by the oesophagus to mechanical obstacles, for they have no oppor- tunity of coming into operation. Accordingly, I directed my inquiries to the question. What is the action of emetics in the horse? and after noting the fact that in general prac- tice they are never employed, because of the general impres- sion that they are wholly inoperative, I proceeded to analyse the experiments instituted for the purpose of determining the effect of injecting tartar emetic into the horse's veins by Dupuy, Renault, Leblanc, and Mignon. The conclusion to which this inquiry led me, was thus expressed: there is strong ground for the belief that the horse is unsusceptible of the specific action of emetics, even when directly injected into the circulatory system. In order to settle the question I determined to appeal to experiment, and injected into the jugular veins of a horse and mule of sound constitution, various watery solutions containing from five to fifty grains 0|f tjie .potassio-tartrate of antimony, but without ever wit- nessing efforts to vomit; wheren])on I thus concluded the memoir: I feel myself justified in stating that all the attempts hitherto made to excite efforts to vomit in the horse by emetics have failed- This unsusceptibility to emetic action, and,ithe/mery .pare uianifestatioa of the phenomena](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2228350x_0008.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
