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If all four feet are involved, the animal stands in the usual position assumed in health, but if urged to move, the least effort to do so usually brings on chronic spasms of the entire body. In very severe cases, a slight touch of the hand will develop the spasms. At times they are so severe, and have such short intermissions, that the disease has been mistaken for tetanus.
My fever had reached the worst stage, but I struggled to my feet got to his bedside, and found him in a state of coma, with his teeth fixed in tetanus. With great difficulty we succeeded in slightly rousing him; with a knife, spoon, and pieces of wood, we forced his teeth open, so as to administer an emetic with good effects, and also other needful medicines.
Unless the patient is in hospital with skilled assistance available, tracheotomy is the safer of the two procedures. Tetanus is a disease resulting from infection of a wound by a specific micro-organism, the bacillus tetani, and characterised by increased reflex excitability, hypertonus, and spasm of one or more groups of voluntary muscles. Etiology and Morbid Anatomy.
There had, however, been a renewal of fighting of late; and at a village called Tasmate, a man named Natungoe had ten days previously been shot in the breast with a poisoned arrow, and was beginning to show those first deadly symptoms of tetanus.
Coupled with this distortion of the face, this Hippocratic smile, or 'risus sardonicus, as the old writers called it, what conclusion would it suggest to your mind?" "Death from some powerful vegetable alkaloid," I answered, "some strychnine-like substance which would produce tetanus." "That was the idea which occurred to me the instant I saw the drawn muscles of the face.
Convulsions, like exhausting exercise, but in a still greater degree, diminish the muscular irritability. Now, when death follows violent and prolonged convulsions, as in tetanus, hydrophobia, some cases of cholera, and certain poisons, rigidity sets in very rapidly, and after a very brief duration, gives place to putrefaction.
The physician continued, "This child," pointing to a beautiful, robust boy of ten years, "was in perfect health, until he fell in the street and received a minor cut which the parents treated with home remedies, but which in a few days was diagnosed as Tetanus."
In the dry, sandy, uncultivated veldt of South Africa, bullet wounds seldom became infected, while those sustained in the highly manured fields of Belgium were almost invariably contaminated with putrefactive organisms, and gaseous gangrene and tetanus were common complications.
And something terrible. For before them, floating upon the air like bobbing heads were Nea's four fantoms, the Kalis, whining hungrily as they came, their copper hair trailing about them. One caught a fugitive as he lagged behind and he died screaming. The Kalis darted this way and that and Grim Hagen's men writhed. Their muscles clenched. Their jaws set as though tetanus had struck them.
It is really a mild form of chronic tetanus, and the prognosis is favourable. It must not be confused with the fixation of the jaw sometimes associated with a wisdom-tooth gumboil, with tonsillitis, or with affections of the temporo-mandibular articulation. Tetanus neonatorum is a form of tetanus occurring in infants of about a week old.
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