This passage from Vavilov’s bad luck tale brought me up short:
Owing to the abrupt shift to abundant fodder after a rather long fast, the stomachs of the mules had become distended and presented a rather typical picture of tympanitis. Two mules had died.
I “know” enough to know that at face value tympanitis ought to be an inflamation of the eardrum, and it is. But I don’t know whether it means something entirely different to an equid veterinarian. As luck would have it, one of my best friends is a world-renowned horse doctor, and this (edited for decency) is what he had to say. [1]
The condition the guy is describing is acute gastric tympany, but in fact he was probably wrong and they had tympany of the caecum (the large brewing vat which is akin to the rumen, but as the horse was designed by an [incompetent engineer] it has no burping mechanism to let out the products of fermentation.).
What happens is: when you do feast after famine, the microbes go berserk, produce lots of gas, and if the gas can’t fart out, which it can’t if this happens so quick that the physical distension of the caecum compresses the out-path (rectum and colon) against the body wall, then they just balloon up and die, often of toxic shock coupled
with physical inability to breathe because the diaphragm gets physically pushed out forward into the chest.In the old days, heroic vets used to trocharise (puncture) the balloon of the caecum, and they were saved … and then they died later of peritonitis.
Tympanitis is inflammation of the eardrum, not commonly fatal, or even diagnosed in the mule I suspect.
Just thought you would want to know.
Notes:
- Thanks, Rob. [↩]
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We did, Jeremy!
Now I’m curious about this: Was this a problem of poor translation, or did he really write that?
Good question, and one that I cannot answer. I don’t know Russian myself (singularly ill-equipped for this venture, I know) and in any case I don’t have the original of Vavilov’s Five Continents. There are other examples of difficult transliterations that have posed problems in getting to the story behind the story, and to be charitable, maybe this was one of those.