A contribution to comparative pathology : being a further inquiry into the reasons why the horse rarely vomits / by Joseph Sampson Gamgee.

  • Gamgee, Sampson, 1828-1886.
Date:
1857
Catalogue details

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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    jerking pressure of two men did not make a single drop of water escape through the oesophagus. ^J. Fluorens devised and executed other experiments, by which he was led to the conclusion that Berlin had with perfect correctness referred the reason why the horse does not vomit, to the sphincter formed by the muscular fibres at the horse's cardia, and to the oblique direction of that orifice. However remarkable it may appear, that such observers as Bertin and Fluorens should at the distance of a century fall into the same error on matters of very simple experiment, there can be no question that they did so with the dead horses' stomachs referred to. The notes of a lengthened series of experiments published in my first 'Inquiry,' disprove the notion that the horse's cardia is, even after death, guarded by a barrier insurmountable to regurgitant fluids. But assuming, for the sake of argu- ment, that when a dead horse's stomach is filled with fluid, and closed by ligature at the duodenum, the cardia remains hermetically closed, however forcibly the viscus be com- pressed, it is matter of surprise that MM. Bertin and Fluorens should not have perceived the fallacy of referring the pheno- menon to a cardiac sphincter, and of regarding the oblique insertion of the oesophagus as an accessory impediment during life to the act of vomiting. When, in his third experiment, M; Fluorens found that by mechanically altering the direction of the cardiac orifice, he influenced the outflow of the stomach's contents, he should have lost all faith in his arguments. Had he connected that observation with the fact that, as muscles, the stomach and oesophagus have during life the power of altering their relative direction, he must have seen that their vital endowments were an insurmount- able barrier to the success of his purely mechanical exj)eri- ments and arguments. Assuming that water did not flow out of the cardia of the distended and compressed dead stomach, Bertin and Fluorens would have avoided the error of referring the phenomenon to sphinctcric action, had they reflected on the post-mortem condition of the lips, the anus, the vulva, and the urinary bladder, which, tight and closed in life, are flaccid and open after death; because sphincters are essentially instruments of life, owing their functional activity to the vital endowment of their constituent muscular fibre, powerless after death. The fifth doctrine confuted in my first ' Inquiry' was Girard's, a compound of Berlin's and Lainoricr's. Girard also attached great weight to the arrangement of the mus- cular fibres at the horse's cardia, and to the peculiar mode of insertion of the oesophagus—conditions discussed in the fore-