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A suppurative arthritis, like that caused by ordinary pus microbes, may be the result of gonococcal infection alone or of a mixed infection. Usually only one joint is affected, but the condition may be multiple. The articular cartilages are destroyed, the ends of the bones are covered with granulations, extra-articular abscesses form, and complete osseous ankylosis results.
If the infection involves all the joint structures acute arthritis the general and local phenomena are intensified, the temperature rises quickly, often with a rigor, and remains high; the patient looks ill, and is either unable to sleep or the sleep is disturbed by starting pains.
I am fully persuaded, that this was your original complaint in Carniola, which those ignorant physicians called, in their jargon, 'Arthritis vaga', and treated as such.
This offers a broad field for experimentation which will in time be productive of a radical change in the manner of treating such cases. Metastatic arthritis is seen more frequently in colts or young animals than in mature horses and we here take the liberty of classifying with the arthritis of omphalophlebitis and strangles the so-called rheumatic variety.
Hughes gives an excellent description of the clinical aspect of arthritis which applies here: Acute arthritis begins like an ordinary attack of synovitis. In joints other than the pedal and pastern, there is sudden and extensive swelling, which at first is intra-articular, succeeded by extra-articular tumefaction, and accompanied by violent lameness. The pain soon becomes intense and agonizing.
Joints having the greater freedom of movement are apt to suffer luxation more frequently. Arthritis. The study of arthritis in the horse is limited to a consideration of joint inflammations which, for the most part, are of traumatic origin. Unlike the human, the horse is not subject to many forms of specific arthritis tubercular, gonorrheal, syphilitic, etc.
There is a constant difference in the degree of pain manifested, as well as the other symptoms of inflammation, between true arthritis, which involves much of the joint, and synovitis; or synovitis plus a small circumscribed area of joint involvement.
Because of the fact that these bones have proportionately large articular surfaces, when they are inflamed to the extent that degenerative changes affect the articular cartilage, complete recovery seldom results. The same pathological changes occur here that are to be seen in any case of arthritis.
Small penetrant wounds which infect the synovial membranes cause infectious arthritis in some cases, whereas a wound of sufficient size to produce evacuation of all synovia will, in many instances, cause no serious distress to the subject, even when not treated for several days.
The adjacent joint may exhibit symptoms which vary from those of a simple effusion to those of a purulent arthritis. The joint symptoms may count for little in the clinical picture, or, as in the case of the hip, may so predominate as to overshadow those of the bone lesion from which they originated.
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