THE DIGESTIVE ORGANS 151 



sweats, and finally drops and dies. Treatment. — To relieve the 

 pain, 4 ounces of laudanum in a pint of linseed oil may be given at 

 once ; blankets wrung out of hot water should be rolled round the 

 body, with a piece of stair-carpeting wound above them, or a good 

 application of mustard and water to the belly. But professional 

 advice ought to be sent for at the very onset, as injections of 60 to 

 80 drop doses of morphia and atropine under the skin are very 

 beneficial in this complaint. 



250. If the inflammation and subsequent death is due to a 

 mineral poison, such as arsenic, or to strong" mineral acids, or 

 to alkaline poison, the post-mortem shows the inside of the stomach 

 raised up, swollen, and of a ripe red-plum colour ; ulcerations may 

 also be present, whilst the pain evinced during life will have been 

 excruciating and acute. But when it is due to the fungi of mouldy 

 grain the pain is slight, with occasional colicky pains and a quick, 

 small pulse. The horse in these cases sometimes lingers on for days 

 in a dull, listless, sickly fashion, occasionally affected with partial 

 paralysis. The post-mortem exhibits patches of congestive inflamma- 

 tion of the stomach and of the intestinal canal. In vegetable 

 poisoning, such as from eating rhododendron, yew, etc., the half- 

 dried twigs of which are more dangerous than the green growing 

 branches, the animal exhibits little or no pain, but suffers greatly 

 from sickness, accompanied by coma, whilst death is very sudden. 

 Treatment. — Give i-pint doses of brandy mixed in 1 to 2 quarts of 

 hot, strong coffee ; or a tablespoonful of carbonate of soda and 1 wine- 

 glassful of aromatic spirits of ammonia given in 1 pint of cold water 

 every five or six hours, and followed up by an occasional dose of raw 

 linseed oil. The post-mortem in cases of vegetable poisoning reveals 

 the lining of the stomach to be much paler than normal, without any 

 signs of inflammation, unless the plants are of an acrid nature, when 

 congestive inflammatory patches are seen. Further reference is made 

 to vegetable poisoning in par. 303. 



251. Bots {Plate XL., Nos. 7, 8, and 9) are the larvae or grubs of 

 a species of the gad-fly, the Gastrophilus of the horse {CEstrus equii), 

 of the order Diptera, or two-winged insect, the breeze or horse bot. 



