INHALATION PNEUMONIA. 
609 
INHALATION PNEUMONIA. 
By W. L. Williams, Professor of Surgery, and P. A. Fish, Professor of Thera¬ 
peutics AT THE New York State Veterinary College. 
A Paper read before the United States Veterinary Medical Association at Nashville, 
September 9, 1897. 
The inhalation of foreign bodies, whether mechanical, chem¬ 
ical or bacterial tend usually toward bacterial invasion of the 
bronchial mucosae, extending thence to the deeper parts, finally 
involving all tissues of the lungs, inducing suppuration, necrosis 
and death. 
The symptoms vary greatly in detail, though in general pre¬ 
sent the ordinary signs of bronchitis and pneumonia, along with 
expectoration of foetid bronchial secretions, with such variations 
in chest sounds as would result from the presence in the tubes 
of the foreign bodies inhaled or of the products of disease. 
The most common causes are the inhalation of medicines 
during their forced administration, of food particles during coma, 
as in parturient apoplexy of the cow, of pathogenic organisms 
and their products after arytenectomy for the cure of laryngis¬ 
mus paralyticus in horses or other operations involving the up¬ 
per air passages, by the inhalation of pus discharged into the 
fauces or upper air passages from abscesses, diseased teeth or tu¬ 
mors, by animal parasites in the air passages, by the inhalation 
of irritant gases, or hot smoke, or of liquid chloroform during 
the production of anaesthesia and by a great variety of more 
rare accidents ending in the lodgment of irritant foreign bodies 
within the air passages. 
We might include also a highly important class of infections 
like diphtheria, in which there is a tendency for the extension 
of the lesions to the lungs, or of tuberculosis, actinomycosis and 
glanders, where there frequently occurs necrosis and softening 
of patches of lung tissue, which, discharging into the bronchii, 
tend to pass upward, only to be in part carried backward into 
neighboring bronchii, establishing there their typical patho- 
