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Migration, Diasporas
and Citizenship

Series Editors
Robin Cohen
Department of International Development
University of Oxford
Oxford, United Kingdom

Zig Layton-Henry
Department of Politics and International Studies
University of Warwick
Kenilworth, United Kingdom
Editorial Board: Rainer Baubock, European University Institute, Italy;
James F. Hollifield, Southern Methodist University, USA; Daniele Joly,
University of Warwick, UK; Jan Rath, University of Amsterdam, The
Netherlands.

The Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship series covers three important


aspects of the migration process: firstly, the determinants, dynamics and
characteristics of international migration. Secondly, the continuing attach-
ment of many contemporary migrants to their places of origin, signified by
the word ‘diaspora’, and thirdly the attempt, by contrast, to belong and
gain acceptance in places of settlement, signified by the word ‘citizenship’.
The series publishes work that shows engagement with and a lively appre-
ciation of the wider social and political issues that are influenced by
international migration. This series develops from our Migraton,
Minorities and Citizenship series, which published leading figures in the
field including Steven Vertovec, Daniele Joly, Adrian Favell, John Rex,
Ewa Morawska and Jan Rath.

More information about this series at


http://www.springer.com/series/14044
Ingrid Palmary

Gender, Sexuality
and Migration
in South Africa
Governing Morality
Ingrid Palmary
African Centre for Migration & Society
University of the Witwatersrand
Johannesburg, South Africa

Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship


ISBN 978-3-319-40732-6 ISBN 978-3-319-40733-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40733-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956662

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016


This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Pattern adapted from an Indian cotton print produced in the 19th century

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature


The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Brendon
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been a long time in the writing and even longer in the
making. Since it reflects on ten years’ worth of work there is a long list of
people to thank. In particular, the amazing people who make up the
African Centre for Migration & Society have stimulated this work. When
I first went to work at the Centre, Loren Landau made it the kind of place
to work that created intellectual curiosity and space to develop even the
most bizarre of ideas. Most of the work described in this volume has
involved a number of colleagues and graduate students in one way or
another and they have provided me with constant theoretical, political and
ethical challenges. The role that students are playing in transforming
South Africa has never been clearer than it is today. In particular, I
thank the following people: Julie Middleton, Thea De Gruchy, Duduzile
Ndlovu, Stanford Mahati, Ronica Zuzu, Tino Jeera Jo Vearey, Zaheera
Jinnah, Brandon Hamber, Monica Kiwanuka, Dostin Lakika and Thabani
Sibanda who have talked with me on so many topics for so many years.
Our conversations have generated most of what is in this book and they
have always been undertaken with generosity and genuine intellectual
curiosity. It has been a privilege to work in an environment that is
supportive, creative and more than a little unorthodox.
Jane Callaghan, Lindsay O’Dell and Erica Burman offered me the
opportunity to present this work in earlier forms at conferences and
other events and I am grateful for this and their ongoing interest in my
work.
Jenny van de Wet did a wonderful job of producing an index at the last
minute for which I am grateful.

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Funding for this work has come from varied sources and I would like to
acknowledge the financial contributions of HIVOS, Atlantic
Philanthropies and the National Research Foundation and the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation.
An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared in the POWS-R as Palmary, I.
(2016). Global feminisms in a time of migration: Gender sexuality and
asylum in South Africa. Psychology of Women Section-Review, 18(1), 13–26.
It is reworked in this book with the kind permission of British
Psychological Society (Psychology of Women Section).
I would also like to thank the International Organization for Migration
and Times Media for allowing me to reproduce the images in Chapters 4
and 5.
Finally I would like to thank Brendon, Tyler and Connor whose endless
questions inspire my curiosity.
CONTENTS

1 Governing Morality: Placing Gender and Sexuality in


Migration 1

2 Migration Journeys 19

3 The Normalization of Violence: Gender, Sexuality and


Asylum 31

4 Trafficking: New Scandals of Slavery Amidst Old Regimes


of Power 53

5 Violence in the Name of Peace: Attacks on Foreign Nationals


in South Africa 79

6 Violence, Victimization and the Making of the Nation 101

References 119

Index 127

ix
CHAPTER 1

Governing Morality: Placing Gender


and Sexuality in Migration

Abstract In this chapter I reflect on the long history of the management


of gender, sexuality and mobility in the making of the South African
nation, tracing examples of how they intersect from early colonization
through apartheid to the present day. Through revisiting this theoretical
terrain I show how mobility, sexuality and gender are deeply intertwined
and, moreover, the making of the state is closely connected to the manage-
ment of the seemingly private sphere. To understand how the project of
statecraft is accomplished, we have to unpack the ways in which intimate
relationships are connected to broad political projects. Finally, I argue that
the making of the nation in South Africa has always been a global process
with strong investments from the global North.

Keywords Nation  Feminism  Nationalism  Statecraft  Global North 


Gender  Sexuality  Colonization

This book considers the intersections of gender, sexuality and migration in the
South African context. Migration in South Africa has become something to be
studied, debated and contested by human rights activists, lawyers, humanitar-
ian workers, government departments and international bodies and conven-
tions. In many ways this is a new debate for South Africa but it is shaped by
global concerns and re-enacted in localized ways that are embedded in South

© The Author(s) 2016 1


I. Palmary, Gender, Sexuality and Migration in South Africa, Migration,
Diasporas and Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40733-3_1
2 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND MIGRATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

African histories of colonization and apartheid. Much of this debate has been
prescribed by very particular, and often taken for granted, sets of assumptions
about what and who migrants are, what gender is, what sexualities are and
their interconnectedness. In this book, I want to take a reflexive step back to
pay attention to these sets of assumptions and reflect on how it is that gender,
sexuality and migration come together in the South African context and with
what consequences.
Reflecting on South Africa does not mean that this is a book about
South Africa. Indeed one of the most important topics elaborated in this
book is the ways in which global and local imperatives are negotiated
constantly as South Africa has re-entered the global economic and political
sphere. Similarly, in talking of the West, the global North or of Africa, I do
not suggest that this reflects a contained and conceptually meaningful
geographical space but rather an idea. An idea imbued with notions of
development, aid, humanitarianism and political interconnectedness and
difference. To paraphrase Veena Das (1996), the nation exists at the level
of icon and it is this iconic representation of a nation that is at once
disconnected from place whilst simultaneously being saturated with inter-
connected symbolic meanings. As Mbembé (2001) notes:

Africa still constitutes one of the metaphors through which the West represents
the origin of its own norms, develops a self-image, and integrates this image
into the set of signifiers asserting what it supposes to be its identity. (p. 2)

Thus, this book engages centrally with the interconnected but unequal
global relationships that constitute present day preoccupations with
migration without imagining that one can ever speak about Africa or the
West as a given. So whilst this book is a series of reflections on the ways
that gender, sexuality and migration have intersected in South Africa since
democracy in 1994, and the new social and moral orders that have been
produced though this intersection, it is equally a book about the place that
South Africa has taken up and continues to negotiate in an increasingly
global, and globally constrained discourse around gender, sexuality and
migration. This means that this is not a book about gendered movement
or even about women’s movement. Nor is it about the abuses faced by
sexual minorities (although no doubt these are reflected upon). It is a
book about the ways in which gendered notions, which may or may not
map onto different bodies function in conversations on migration and the
global consequences thereof.
1 GOVERNING MORALITY: PLACING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MIGRATION 3

Migration in South Africa is often represented as something that began


with the end of apartheid. However, many South African writers have
reminded us that the figure of the migrant has been a significant one for
the making of the South African nation (see Van Onselen 2001). For
example, the early work of Bozzoli and Nkotsoe (1991) on women’s
migration to the cities points to how South Africa has been founded on
physical segregation and the regulation of the movement of “undesirable”
groups particularly to and within urban areas (see also Van Onselen 2001).
The regulation of mobility was equally central to the apartheid project
where the rhetoric of two nations (black and white) was used to justify the
restriction of black South Africans to the independent homelands and
townships. The system of pass laws that regulated the movement of
black South Africans was central to the apartheid project. It was also
heavily gendered and differential laws were enacted for men (defined as
labourers) and women (defined dependents). This has meant that, with
the end of apartheid, South Africa was ripe for an approach to migration
management that was focussed on the restriction of the movement of the
poor. As Landau (2012) has noted, the democratic South Africa inherited
a “deep suspicion of those that move – particularly to urban areas – [that]
continues to infuse political and popular discourse” (p. 5). I would add
that this suspicion of those who move was an approach to thinking about
mobility that had already gained international credibility when South
Africa achieved independence and found consensus within South African
preoccupations with regulating the poor.
In addition, there has been useful history of attention to how gender,
particularly in times of conflict has shaped nation building both in South
Africa and internationally. Since the early 1980s feminist writers have
considered how the nation is produced and invented in ways that are
thoroughly gendered (see for example McClintock 2013; Yuval-Davis
1993). For example, Yuval-Davis et al. (1989) as early as 1989, articulated
how the prevailing literature on the construction and formation of the
nation had failed to account for how practices of nation building are
rooted in representations of family, home, reproduction and the masculine
protection of the “womenandchildren” (see also Burman 2008a). From
this work stemmed an increasing attention to how nationalism functions as
a system of cultural representation (see Dowler 1998) whereby people
come to identify with an imagined community (Hobsbawm and Ranger
2012). The ways in which women have been forgotten, selectively remem-
bered and represented within nationalist rhetoric became an important set
4 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND MIGRATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

of conceptual resources for unpacking and making visible the myth of the
nation – one that has been developed in useful ways in the anti-colonial
struggles that have characterized that past 50 years on the African con-
tinent by (Meintjes et al. 2001; Turshen et al. 1998). These literatures on
gender and nation have provided one of the richest intellectual traditions
precisely for the way in which they have been written by authors from
postcolonial contexts and from the Empire and read together can help us
to understand the ways in which global colonial relationships persist even
as we see an increasing “methodological nationalism” that sees us confin-
ing our research to particular country contexts understanding anything
that crosses a border as “comparative research” (Wimmer and Glick
Schiller 2002). However, these interconnections remain underdeveloped
and addressing this is a significant aim of this book.
For the purposes of this book, it is useful to extend one perhaps less clearly
articulated aspect of this existing work to think about where we find our-
selves today in contemporary South Africa. Within this area of work has been
consideration of how bodies are appropriated in the imagining of a national
project and how they become the objects on which the desire for nationalism
is (often brutally and sometimes willingly) inscribed. For example, Ryan and
Ward (2004) note the significance of forcibly cutting women’s hair in
Northern Ireland as an act of humiliation. Also from Northern Ireland
Smyth (1992) has documented the political tensions over the debate on
abortion and the symbolism that abortion holds in the nationalist project.
Equally, in South Africa we have seen differential approaches to abortion for
black and white women with heavily criminalization of abortion for white
women existing alongside the forced abortion and sterilization of many
black women (Bradford 1991). Perhaps the most extreme manifestation of
this would be the prevalence of rape in times of war as an act of violence that
symbolically is not just perpetrated against individual women but against
women as representatives of the boundary of a group and women’s sexuality
a symbol of the group’s very existence. From this work we can consider that
the violation of women’s bodies, creates what Das (1996) refers to as “a
future memory . . . that the women as territory had already been claimed and
occupied by other men” (p. 85).
Extending these debates we can see how the regulation of sex is central
to the making of a nation. Whether it is through legislation like the
Immorality Act (1957) in South Africa which criminalized sex between
people classified as belonging to different race groups, or insisting on the
patrilineal classification of mixed Hutu and Tutsi children in Rwanda (see
1 GOVERNING MORALITY: PLACING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MIGRATION 5

Palmary 2006), the nation is made through the regulation of sex. From
the regulation of sexual relationships, stems a broader set of gendered
relationships and norms that frame and reinscribe national identity. What
is perhaps more important for this book is the way that, through these
sexual regulations, national identity becomes naturalized. It is the every-
day acceptance of what are in fact a highly constrained set of practices
around sex, childbirth and identity that make national identity appear
timeless and natural. We only have to think of an example from the
South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission where Victor
Mthembu, in his defence against killing a 9-month old baby in the course
of the Boibatong massacre, drew on a proverb which translates as “a snake
gives birth to another snake” (see Palmary 2006 for more). Similarly,
Coleman (2002) notes how the anti-Tutsi propaganda in Rwanda repre-
sented Tutsi women in sexual relationships with United Nations soldiers
and declared Hutus who had sex with or married Tutsi’s to be traitors of the
nation. For example, of the widely promoted Hutu Ten Commandments
published in a December issue of the newspaper Kangura, (Coleman 2002)
regulated marriage and sexual relationships across ethnic divisions. They
stated that:

Every Hutu should know that a Tutsi woman, wherever she is, works for the
interest of her Tutsi ethnic group. As a result, we shall consider a traitor any
Hutu who: marries a Tutsi woman; befriends a Tutsi woman; employs a
Tutsi woman as a secretary or concubine; Every Hutu should know that our
Hutu daughters are more suitable and conscientious in their role as woman,
wife and mother of the family. Are they not beautiful, good secretaries and
more honest? Hutu woman, be vigilant and try to bring your husbands,
brothers and sons back to reason; The Rwandese Armed Forces should be
exclusively Hutu. The experience of the October [1990] war has taught us a
lesson. No member of the military shall marry a Tutsi. (cited in Coleman
2002, pp. 748–9)

The interrelationship between violence, nation and family is stark in this


example. So much so that Mamdani (2014), in his book on the Rwandan
genocide, was able to declare that in Rwanda everyone is either Hutu or
Tutsi there are no Hutsi’s. In these and other examples, the regulation of
sexual relationships, marriage and birth function to reproduce the bound-
aries of a nation defined by race, space or ethnicity. It is the presumed
naturalness of sexuality understood to be biological that allows it to render
6 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND MIGRATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

one’s nationality a “fact” that is uncontested. As Mtembu inferred in his


testimony to the South African Truth and reconciliation Commission, a
snake will, quite clearly, give birth to another snake thus drawing on and
reproducing taken for granted notions of the transmission of values and
beliefs through blood and family; biology and culture. This casting of
birth as a biological fact is what draws the boundaries of, in this example,
an ethic identity. In these examples we see at work Butlers claim at work
when she says that race and sex are vectors of power that deploy each other
for their own articulation (Butler 2011).
However, this is a narrative that goes beyond bodies as the property of
individuals. Das (2007) reminds us of how the magnification of the image of
the nation draws energy from the image of magnified sexuality to explain
how these ideas of sexuality and nation function at the level of icon –
irrespective of their material realities. To draw on a South African example,
the centrality of the image of violated white women under apartheid had cur-
rency regardless of whether white women were indeed violated and with
what frequency. Van Onselen (2001) notes in his work on the early forma-
tion of Johannesburg that there were frequent moral panics in this time over
white women claiming sexual assault by black men. In this way, the discourse
of violation allows us to recast the nation as a masculine project of protec-
tion. Critiquing a reference to womanhood as a sacred Victorian institution,
Das claims that “when the massacre of women is reported as the destruction
of an institution, we know that the sacred image of womanhood has outlived
the story of women’s lives” (Das 2007, p. 83). Thus, for Grosz (1994 albeit
writing in a very different context):

[F]ar from being an inert, passive, noncultural and ahistorical term, the body
may be seen as the crucial term, the site of contestation, in a series of
economic, political, sexual, and intellectual struggles. (p. 19)

And so we can see then how the body and the violence against it speaks.
A far cry from the South African angst over so-called gratuitous violence
with its implication of meaningless violence without reason (a topic I return
to in the following chapters), I would argue that violence always has mean-
ing. Inflicting pain, how it is done and for what ends tells a story cast in the
history of the national project. But we should not think of this violence
only operating through war (or public violence as in the necklacing – see
1 GOVERNING MORALITY: PLACING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MIGRATION 7

Chapter 5). For example, Mehta (2000) shows how circumcision functions
to distinguish Muslims from Hindus in ways that equally reflects the history
of partition. For him:

Circumcision . . . occur[s] within a frame where festivities, blood, pain and


exhibitionism accompany the trauma wittingly inflicted by the group to
maintain its cohesion. (p. 87)

However, as much as this violence solidifies group membership, it also


threatens intimate relationships creating a context where all belonging is
placed under suspicion and bodies are scrutinized for appropriate markers
of belonging.
Even less well-documented than the regulation of sexuality is perhaps
the ways in which this maps onto place (for notable exceptions see
Ahmed 2013). As McClintock et al. (1997) argue, home and accompa-
nied notions of the loss of home is a symbol of modernity in the Western
world and, at least in part, drives a current preoccupation with human
mobility. However home takes on multiple and contested meanings; as
country, property or sense of belonging. The contestations of home as a
place, and the ways in which claims to place are made, equally evoke
notions of birth-right, indigeneity and rootedness that are based on
family, marriage and sexual relationships. Notions of home, so frequently
evoked in nationalist rhetoric, are shot through with racialized, sexua-
lized and more generally gendered contestations. For example, the mid-
dle-class home as a place of leisure and consumption stands in stark
contrast to the representation of poor homes as places of violence,
neglect and dysfunction, a topic that will be explored in this book. This
very brief contrast of different kinds of homes already shows that home is
a normative idea associated less with the everyday practices and places
that make up homes and more with prescriptions about how homes
should be. Clearly home as a place and home as an idea are entangled
but not synonymous. The idea of home allows for an analysis that moves
away from a focus on different categories of people such as children,
women or sexual minorities and allows us to think about how the idea of
home instead participates in the production of these seemingly intract-
able categories. It goes without saying that home is a politicized concept
and unpacking the idea of home makes visible the politicized nature of
8 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND MIGRATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

seemingly natural categories such as the child the adult, men and women
and their mutual construction. In this sense home regulates – it shapes
and constrains sexual relationships, adult-child relationships and rela-
tionships between men and women. It equally creates normative expec-
tations of what the members of a home should and can do, foreclosing
alternatives.
But home and its associated spacial metaphors also connects these see-
mingly intimate spaces with broader political projects such as the invention
of the homeland (or perhaps even more insidiously the motherland). This is
equally a notion of home that regulates; in, for example, the ways in which
home country is used to deny movement of certain groups, to forcibly send
others home as well as to assign or revoke rights and entitlements. The idea
of home as a place of family life is complicit in the making of the nation even
as it is constantly represented as outside of the scope of state intervention.
Indeed the regulation of family relationships is central to the making of the
homeland and is violently regulated for its potential to disrupt the national
project. Thus for Said (1993) geography is the imperial methodology.
However this is not limited to periods of colonization and remains as true
now as when it was written, as evidenced by the current deaths of migrants
attempting to cross the Mediterranean and reach Europe. Clearly, the idea
of home is saturated with affect. Whether as a place of love, care and
nurturing or as a place of anger violence and oppression, home is a powerful
metaphor precisely because of its emotional pull. If to feel at home is to
belong then the idea of home is surely one rooted in protection and love.
Affect is perhaps the most artificially depoliticized of constructs (see Ahmed
2013). These themes and their connections to nation building emerge
centrally in the chapters to follow.

GENDER, SEX AND THE SOUTH AFRICAN NATIONAL PROJECT(S)


South Africa has undergone massive political and social changes since the
end of apartheid and this has heralded in a new set of norms, laws and
social and political preoccupations. Nowhere is this more evident than in
the fact that one of the earliest attempts at reworking South African social
norms after apartheid was a moral regeneration project headed by
President Jacob Zuma and aimed at combatting what was seen as moral
degeneration as well as supporting “traditional and cultural pro-
grammes”.1 As with other efforts to rewrite a narrative of what South
Africa is (of which the TRC must be the most far reaching) there is a very
1 GOVERNING MORALITY: PLACING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MIGRATION 9

real sense of South Africa changing or needing change, however ambigu-


ously or conflictually defined. However amidst the numerous efforts at
change there is also much that remains the same and recent events of crass
racism and ongoing violence suggest that familiar struggles remain even if
they take new forms.
Given the massive social change that the country has gone through, there
remains merit in thinking about new manifestations of the production of the
nation in light of the transition to democracy as well as current South African
concerns about migration. Whilst a detailed historical reflection on the place
of migration in South Africa’s nation-building project is beyond the scope of
this book, I want to touch on a few examples from different historical times
in order to illustrate the point. These are times in South African history that
have at their core, a preoccupation with and regulation of the sexual practices
of those at the (always contested) boundaries of the nation. They are also
times where the nation was very overtly and geographically reconfigured and
the stakes for inclusion or exclusion ran high. Each of these moments has
been where the centrality of sexual regulation becomes a preoccupation –
one that is driven by the need to rethink what constitutes the nation and
which bodies belong. Indeed, as I will elaborate, it is precisely the sense that
the nation is under threat that creates a set of conditions conducive to
repressive and violent regulation of sexuality.
A first illustration goes back to early colonial investigations into the
sexuality of black (South) Africans. Phillips (2002) points to the enormous
emphasis on the regulation of sex in the colonies by the colonial authorities –
mostly focussed on prostitution and trafficking (which were often conflated).
He notes how the National Vigilance Association (a group set up to prevent
the trafficking of “white” women) moved to the colonies to launch commit-
tees against trafficking, promoting a discourse on sexuality that was rooted in
European concerns about sex work whilst nevertheless being shaped and re-
worked by supporters and critics in the colonies. Phillips describes how the
committees established by the National Vigilance Campaign were encour-
aged by the fact that “other nations followed the noble repentance of
England” (Phillips 2002, p. 344). This was accomplished through a dis-
course on health and morality which functioned to legitimate the project of
producing the nation, defined at this moment as the Empire. Van Onselen’s
(2001) work on the emergence of Johannesburg from a diggers camp to a
fully-fledged working class mining town shows how sex work was a profes-
sion for in excess of 10,000 women and prostitutes from all over Southern
Africa were, over time, drawn to the goldfields. When in 1887 Johannesburg
10 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND MIGRATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

was granted powers of local government, one of the first responses was the
punishment of prostitution, something that was further attempted by the
British and the Afrikaner governments in successive periods of time. Van
Onselen thus refers to a “barrage of legislation over a ten year period” (2001,
p. 112) attempting to regulate the vices of the newly formed Johannesburg.
He notes that the Contagious Diseases Act passed in 1885 was modelled on
its British counterpart but implemented shortly before the British Act was
repealed, suggesting high levels of enthusiasm for this kind of regulation in
the colonies. In addition, his work documents an increasing movement of
women between Europe and Southern Africa that followed and was shaped
by economic developments in both countries. Amidst the periodic calls for
the abolishment of prostitution was debate, noted by Van Onselen (2001),
on whether and to what extent Johannesburg should follow the legal route
of Britain. This is a topic that will recur throughout this book. However,
what is significant for this work is how legislation in Johannesburg developed
through a complex engagement with colonial powers. The situation
described by Van Onselen (2001) is not unlike how, in Uganda, early
reproductive and parenting programmes functioned to create a sense of
national identification and pride rooted in the “strength” (defined once
more through a blurring of morality and health) of the Ugandan family
(Summers 1991). Early manifestations of this colonial preoccupation with
sexuality can be seen in Van Heyningen’s (1984) analysis of how South
Africa became a settler society at least in part because of a concern that white
sex workers were working in the Cape Colony and selling sex to black men.
The spacial separation of men and women was thought to produce promis-
cuity that could only be solved by a return to family values. Thus the decision
to bring families to the Cape Colony was one rooted in the concern that sex
across race groups would undermine the project of colonization and having
families would curtail men’s sexually inappropriate behaviour. Clearly as
Stoler (1995) shows in her critique and re-reading of Foucault’s History of
Sexuality “discourses on sexuality, like other cultural, political or economic
assertions, cannot be charted in Europe alone” (p. 7). Rather, the colonies
were a shadow against which the Empire could be built and Western
morality defined and it is precisely this interconnectedness that I am con-
cerned with in this book.
If we consider, as a second example, the way that apartheid was
implemented, it created as central pillars of its legal and moral frame-
work the Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act. Significantly,
these Acts perpetuated the myth that South Africa is a country of two
1 GOVERNING MORALITY: PLACING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MIGRATION 11

nations – black and white. Prohibitions on sex between people of


different race groups and their energetic policing set up an environ-
ment of sex as something to be regulated, contained and punished in
the interests of the nation. Again this was accomplished by a similar
discourse around disease and morality, read through the concerns of
the present (Foucault 1978) in ways that resulted in boundaries of the
nation shifting to define black South Africans as outside of and a threat
to the nation. Hyslop (1995) provides just one analysis of this in his
description of a poster urging support for the “Purified National Party”
which demanded protection for “white” women (referred to as the
“Hope of South Africa”) from “Mixed Marriages which the United
Party will not Prohibit by Law” (Cited in Hyslop 1995, p. 57). Thus
the reassertion of national boundaries, defined in this example as the
Afrikaner nation and, at others as the white nation remained a key
outcome of the management of sexuality whilst the naturalness of both
continued to be insisted upon through a familial discourse of sex and
reproduction.
What is perhaps most important is that each of these periods represents
a moment of perceived threat to the nation; A time where who falls inside
or outside its (physical and symbolic) borders is challenged and what can
be claimed as a result is seen to be under threat. The regulation of sexuality
is no coincidence but rather is essential if the notion of a blood tie to a
nation is to be upheld.
What I want to suggest is that South Africa is currently in another key
period of re-making the nation after independence in 1994. During apartheid
it was the predatory nature of black men and the reproductive excesses of black
women that were to be contained. Now we see a shift to the cross border
migrant as the body associated with stigma, threat and disease in a threat to the
new post-apartheid nation. These discursive shifts map predictably onto the
changing boundaries of the nation state. The new group set at the margins of
the nation state threatening to puncture its protective shield is the migrant.

MORAL REGENERATION: REMAKING SOUTH AFRICA


AFTER INDEPENDENCE

Once more, in contemporary South Africa, the project of redefining


society after apartheid has been framed as a moral one. From the early
moral regeneration campaigns to the contemporary focus on “ethical
leadership” popular discourse seems caught in a moral panic in which
12 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND MIGRATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

the regulation of gender and sexuality continues to figure centrally. In this


book, I look at three ways in which migration, gender and sexuality come
together in contemporary South Africa. These are: the way that gender-
based persecution has been conceptualized and assessed in the asylum
system, the recent attention to issues of human trafficking and the violence
against foreigners in South Africa. These seemingly disparate areas of
preoccupation, when read together, allow us to consider contemporary
ways that gender, sexuality and migration converge in the making of new
moral orders. In this book I want to look at several examples of how
sexuality and gender have figured in the South African post-apartheid
discourse on migration in order to pose the question: What has migration,
gender and sexuality become, by what means and with what effects. Thus
my question is less to show the ways in which female or gender non-
conforming migrants experience migration, but rather to ask, how have
different groups – activists, policy makers, perpetrators of xenophobic
violence and so on – drawn connections between gender, sexuality and
migration and with what consequences. What forms of knowledge has the
contemporary framing of these constructs allowed for and what have they
foreclosed.
This book is a collation of some of the research that has been under-
taken over the past 10 years under a collaborative research programme
entitled Gender, Violence and Displacement at the African Centre for
Migration & Society. Whilst the details of specific pieces of research are
documented in Chapter 2, there have been a number of overarching
questions that have animated this programme of work. In particular:
What forms of government have been developed to respond to the pre-
carious lives of migrants? Who are the actors in these systems of govern-
ance (be they social workers, international organizations, NGOs, the state
or researchers) and how have these differing groups come to know and
intervene with migrants?
If this is the notion of governance that I am working from then it is one
that can only see discourse as being produced in multiple places and in
contested ways. Although Chapters 3, 4 and 5 lean heavily on empirical
research the arguments draw on a number of observations and experiences
that I have gleaned from working in this field for nearly 20 years.
Following Foucault (1978), I acknowledge that knowledge produced in
multiple places taking non-linear and complex tangents. Similarly, whilst
research is profiled in this book I recognize that there are multiple “ways
of knowing” that are valid and help to make meaning. Thus writing a book
1 GOVERNING MORALITY: PLACING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MIGRATION 13

inevitably involves a degree of infidelity to the complexity of a problem.


Nevertheless I have drawn on broad experiences and research whilst
profiling three case studies more clearly in order to map the contemporary
links between gender, sexuality and migration and what they can tell us
about South Africa’s complex navigation of postcoloniality, international
political regimes and local practices of compassion and violence. In short,
the moral order that is evoked when we consider South Africa after apart-
heid though the lens of migration.
The programme of work that this book draws on began with a focus on
how gender – at that time defined broadly and somewhat problematically –
functioned to shape what we know about the migrant and how we know
migrants. In this book I read sexuality and gender together – not because I
feel that they are the same or because, as is assumed in so many policy fields,
that sexuality is one aspect of gender. Rather the contrasting ways in which
sexuality and gender have been attended to is my focus. I will argue that read
together, they provide an important way of conceptualizing how morality
operates in the management of migration from the asylum system, to the
deportation of and violence against foreigners. Morality both legitimates and
closes down certain migration practices and it is these effects that I focus on.
As Foucault points out:

Sexuality is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather
one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality: useful for the
greatest number of manoeuvres and capable of serving as a point of support,
as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies. (Foucault 1978, p. 103)

Several authors have noted how after war, there is a common call to return
to traditional values and imagined pre-war life (Meintjes et al. 2001). This
often takes as its focus the regulation of family life. Moments of social
anxiety are frequently characterized by preoccupation with sexuality and
gender relations. For Fahs et al. (2013) moral panics divert attention from
broader social problems. As she notes:

When the government bans images of coffins and body bags returning from
war and makes only half-hearted attempts at lessening poverty, blowjob
scandals and “slutty” teenagers become apt attention diverting replace-
ments. (pp. 4–5)
14 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND MIGRATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

Drawing from this, South Africa is in a moment of perceived crisis where


the promises of freedom have often not materialized, where inequality and
violence have continued to characterize society and where frustrations
(witnessed for example in the widespread and often violent service delivery
protests) are high. At moments like these “a mass hysterical forgetting and
silencing seems to occur” (Fahs et al. 2013, p. 7) where gender and
sexuality become preoccupations of society but in ways that eclipse the
very real gendered inequalities in favour of the spectacular and the exotic.
In elaborating these points in the chapters that follow I will also draw out
the question of what the range of technologies for governing migrants
might be; how are they practiced and reproduced in different settings in
South Africa, who some of the actors (such as social scientists, organized
thugs and international NGOs) are and how these groups consolidate
their work on the notion of law and morality that are typical of our
political time. In particular, I focus on how new yet contested moral
orders are constructed in South Africa in the context of global notions
of rights, law and ethics.

SOME OCCLUSIONS
This book offers an inevitably partial view of a vast topic. My perspective on
the topic is centrally an urban one viewed from the symbolic position of the
city of Johannesburg. Johannesburg is the stuff of fantasy. As Mahati (2015)
notes, children from Zimbabwe refer to the whole of South Africa as Joni;
to be in South Africa is to be in Johannesburg. It is a place of notorious
brutality and violence but also a place of opportunity and possibility – a city
build on gold. In this vein Mpe (2001) refers to Hillbrow (an inner city
suburb of Johannesburg) as a place of “milk honey and bile”. It is a place
that travel guides warn visitors to avoid and yet it is a place to which
hundreds of people from all over the continent flock in order to “make it”.
Johannesburg is predictably a place where migration has a huge sym-
bolic meaning. From the early migrants who came to what was then a bare
patch of land and set up a tent town to mine gold to contemporary
movements of Zimbabweans, Congolese, Chinese, Bangladeshi’s and
Somalis, it remains a place of possibility (see also Palmary et al. 2015).
As Mbembe Nuttall et al. (2008) note:

Civil life appears as an inchoate mix of ruthlessness and kindness, cruelty and
tenderness, indifference and generosity. (pp. 6–7)
1 GOVERNING MORALITY: PLACING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MIGRATION 15

Its motto “a world class African city” shows its complex and contested
symbolism; at once making a claim to Africa and at the same reflecting
ambivalence as African – suggesting that being world class makes it unlike
other African cities. This is an identity that will be explored more deeply in
the pages to follow. Thus, the book, whilst making broader comments on
South African and global moral preoccupations with migration, necessarily
eclipse experiences that fall outside of the urban. At its most pragmatic,
this is justified because refugee reception centres and embassies in South
Africa are entirely located in urban areas (with the exception of the Musina
border post) making migration, through bureaucratic design an urban
concern. Nevertheless, the reflections in this book are coloured by my
position in Johannesburg. This is a problem in so far as rural life in South
Africa, is barely visible, seldom researched and often assumed to be known
and timeless.
The case studies included also represent three of an almost endless set
of possible illustrations. As such this work is necessarily a first step in
attending to gender, sexuality and migration from a context which is
seldom researched given the dominance of Northern Academia. No
doubt there are many other ways to weave meaning from the multitude
of places and contexts in which migration debates take place.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK


In Chapter 2, I provide a brief background to migration in South Africa.
In addition, I outline the methodologies that I used for each of the studies
found in Chapters 3, 4 and 5. All three of the studies have been ongoing in
different forms for almost a decade. For example, the first research that was
conducted on the asylum claims brought on the basis of sexual orienta-
tion, was conducted in 2007 and was updated and refocussed on sexual
orientation asylum claims in 2014/2015. Similarly the chapter dealing
with trafficking follows debates that began in earnest in 2008 but continue
today looking at the ways in which they have changed and been reformu-
lated. The chapter on violence against foreigners is based on two periods
of research, one undertaken in 2011 and one in 2015 following two
significant outbreaks of violence against foreigners. In each of these pro-
jects, the methodological focus is qualitative and designed to gain under-
standing of how different actors negotiate and take up different discourses
of gender sexuality and migration.
16 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND MIGRATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

In Chapter 3, I look at asylum as a key system of protection for vulner-


able migrants. In focussing on how gender and sexuality have been taken up
in the asylum system, I trace, through an analysis of UN documents, a
discourse of increasing protection and the elimination of biases in the
asylum system. I then argue that this stands in direct contrast to actual
practices of asylum recognition globally which are increasingly focussed on
exclusion rather than inclusion. From this point of departure I analyse how
exclusion happens in the South African context. The key way in which this
takes place is through the requirement of excessive violence. By framing
violence as an ordinary part of the experiences of women and sexual
minorities, the standards of persecution are made excessively high.
Secondly, exclusion takes place through the ways in which a constrained
notion of identity is expected and required in asylum procedures. Finally
exclusion takes place through a form of migration management that I refer
to as “disordered regulation”. Through a range of subtle and often implicit
rules and practices most would be asylum seekers are unable to access the
asylum system. In this section I consider the informal ways that migration is
managed in South Africa including corruption, unwritten rules of engage-
ment, bureaucratic complexity and rumours among migrant groups. All of
these informal systems of control work to manage asylum applications in
ways that shape who can and cannot access the system.
This chapter concludes by connecting the asylum system to the broader
system of migration management in South Africa. In doing so I return to
the initial analysis of UN documents to trace how global concerns have
been taken up and reworked in the South African context. I argue that put
into the context of a broader system on migration control the asylum
system naturalizes place and nation as a form of identification and repre-
sents movement as only ever possible under the most extreme forms of
violence. I then show that the way certain kinds of violence are framed and
legitimated in the asylum system participates in the more oppressive forms
of migration control including extensive detention and deportation. It is
only because South Africa meets its international obligations in a global
context of restrictions on movement that these more overtly violent
systems of migration control can be justified.
In Chapter 4 I trace the paths of influence that led to the creation of the
South African Trafficking Act from the first demotion of South Africa in
the US Department of State Trafficking in Persons (TiP) Report through
to the 2010 FIFA football World Cup. I argue that the global influence
and concern for migration control has resulted in law that is at odds with
1 GOVERNING MORALITY: PLACING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN MIGRATION 17

South African realities and, in ignoring significant forms of violence whilst


attending to others, new forms of entitlement and exclusion are created.
The focus of this chapter is therefore on how and why trafficking has come
to matter and which combination of role players, and socio-political con-
texts made South Africa a target for intervention and a receptive context
for counter trafficking debates.
I begin the chapter by looking at how the US trafficking in persons
report shaped the South African parliamentary debates on trafficking. I
then look at how research has been taken up in advocacy in ways that has
created trafficking as a problem of mobility and individualized persecu-
tion. Following on from this I analyse the representations of victims and
perpetrators and look at how in practice this creates constrained notions of
vulnerability that are at odds with patterns of movement in the South
African context. In this chapter, the themes of global and local connec-
tions in policy are most starkly drawn and elaborated. In addition the
notion of morality as a guiding force behind migration management is also
discussed. The ways in which these globalized moralities shape the practice
of statecraft is a key theoretical contribution of this chapter.
In Chapter 5 I focus on the extensive violence against foreigners that
has taken place in South Africa since 2005. The chapter predominantly
focusses on the views of those who have been perpetrators and organizers
of the violence. I explore three moral codes that the perpetrators of
violence against foreigners use to legitimate their actions. The first is,
law and criminality. Here I explore how perpetrators (in a seemingly
contradictory move) use notions of law (and migration as being a pre-
dominantly illegal action) to justify their violence against foreigners in
South Africa. Connected to this is a theme on rights and entitlements in
which I explore how notions of rights are used to justify nationally based
entitlements and the third is freedom and democracy. In elaborating these
themes I look at how the political transition that South Africa has under-
gone is used as a justification for excluding foreigners in the name of
realizing freedom. Each of these themes represents moral orders that are
deeply connected to South Africa’s political transition. In this chapter, we
see not just how nation building legitimates anti-foreigner sentiment but
more than this how the new language that was adopted of rights, law and
citizenship is being reworked as poor township residents claim a stake in
the new South African order.
In Chapter 6 I pull out the cross cutting themes from the preceding
empirical chapters. Firstly, returning to the literature outlined in the
18 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND MIGRATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

introductory chapter, I revisit new forms of nation building that take place
through the reworking of gender, sexuality and migration. I reconsider
the new ways that old intersections of nation, gender and sexual regulation
work to construct the nation state and I retrace the new moral orders that
have been produced through the focus on migration in post-apartheid
South Africa.
In particular, I consider the ways that notions of victims, and legitimate
violence shape the moral framing of migration and establish new forms of
inclusion and exclusion. This shapes the nature and historical forms that
humanitarian responses have (and can) take in South Africa.
In addition, global and local influences are an important theme in each
of the chapters. This takes us beyond a simple reflection on how the North
influences the South to consider how global politics has been reconfigured
after African independence. The empirical chapters trace just some of these
spheres of influence and force us to rethink a simple binary between the
“West and the rest”.
Finally I consider how ideas of democracy and human rights have been
reworked in the South African context to create the conditions for exclu-
sion based on national identity. The popular imagination of South Africa’s
struggle has indeed meant that political freedom has become a system of
regulation.

NOTE
1. See www.mrm.org.za
CHAPTER 2

Migration Journeys

Abstract In this chapter, I very briefly introduce mobility in post-apart-


heid South Africa. I also outline the methodologies used for each of the
studies that Chapters 3–5 draw on. All three of the studies have been
ongoing in different forms for almost a decade. The different methods
used include ethnography, process tracing to understand global and local
policy actors, in-depth interviews, observations and document analysis.
Whilst data from these different research studies is presented in each of the
chapters, the focus of the book is focussed on the broader questions that
can be answered by these studies rather than their empirical details.

Keywords Migration  Apartheid  Ethnography  Process tracing  Key


informant interviews

In this chapter, I want to document briefly my journey to the study of


migration in order to give contextual and methodological background to
the case studies that follow. In 1998, after completing my graduate degree
in psychology, I was sent to Johannesburg to complete the required
internship at the Johannesburg General hospital (now Charlotte Maxeke
Hospital) and the Chris Hani Baragwanath hospital, two of the largest in
the Southern Hemisphere. This represented a transitional moment as I
was faced, through my early research, with the fascination of a city like

© The Author(s) 2016 19


I. Palmary, Gender, Sexuality and Migration in South Africa, Migration,
Diasporas and Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40733-3_2
20 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND MIGRATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

Johannesburg as well as the stark implications of apartheid separate devel-


opment policies and how complicit certain forms of research were in
reproducing them.
Following this I joined the Centre for the Study of Violence and
Reconciliation (CSVR) where I conducted research on gender, race and
violence after apartheid and its connections to new systems of governance
that were being set up in urban centres across the country. At this time,
many at the CSVR were concerned with ideas of post-conflict reconciliation
and with building credible institutions such as police and local government
structures and I was deeply influenced by them. By 2001, issues of migra-
tion had come to occupy a small but significant space in the public dis-
course. The focus at this time was almost entirely on refugees and the mood
was generally sympathetic with an emphasis on the need for South Africans
to reciprocate the support that other African countries gave to exiled South
Africans during apartheid. In my work on post-conflict societies I began to
work on topics related to gender and trauma among refugee groups.
However, in time I became increasingly fascinated with how migrants,
most of who were from parts of Africa outside of South Africa, figured in
South African conceptualizations of race and the ways in which this was
constituted through gender (see Palmary 2006). I then began to research
women’s involvement in armed conflict in South Africa and the Democratic
Republic of Congo and their displacement experiences. From this work
developed my concern with the ways in which race and gender operate as
mutually defining constructs that shape notions of inclusion and exclusion –
a topic which I continue explore in this work.
From 2005 migration became a more central focus of study for me and
at that stage the Forced Migration Studies Centre (now African Centre for
Migration & Society) began to grow into an exciting academic environ-
ment. Over a 10-year period, a number of research collaborations have
shaped what this book has become. Before elaborating these, a brief
background to migration in South Africa is useful.

A BRIEF NOTE ON POST-APARTHEID MIGRATION


IN SOUTH AFRICA
As apartheid was drawing to an end in 1993, the South African coalition
government signed an agreement with the United Nations High Comissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR) which indicated that South Africa was generally
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
CRYPTOGAMIC POISONING IN SWINE.

Spoiled foods. Toxic rye. Botulism. Brine poisoning. Flesh of overdriven


(leucomaines). Symptoms: from mouldy bread, brain disorder, gastric, urinary,
hæmatic: from brine, restlessness, convulsions, eructations, vomiting, weakness,
paresis. Lesions: congestion of stomach, bowels and mesenteric glands; with brine,
heart and skin charged with black blood, congestion of brain, kidneys and bladder.
Petechiæ. Treatment: empty stomach, emetics, purgatives, potassium iodide,
antiferments, sedatives, cold to head, enemata, counter-irritants. Prevention.

Causes. Spoiled foods of all kinds such as mouldy bread, musty


meal, spoiled grains of all kinds, or rotten potatoes, or apples are
common causes of poisoning. In specimens of toxic rye Woronin
found four fungi:—fusarium roseum, gilberella Sanbinetti,
belminthosporium, and cladosporium herbarium. Prilleux
and Delacroix have obtained a fifth, endoconidium temulentum.
Rye so affected produced nervous disorder in swine, dogs, birds and
even in man. Pigs often die from botulism, being fed flesh in a more
or less advanced stage of putrefaction. Old meat brine is also a
source of toxin and ptomaine poisoning since its toxic property
increases with age which is not the case with a mere solution of
common salt. Yet this is very deadly to the pig, a half a pint often
proving fatal. Kuhnert records that the flesh of an overdriven horse
proved fatal to the pigs that ate it.
Symptoms. From mouldy bread the pig becomes dull, stupid,
sluggish, stiff, stilty and staggering in his gait, and usually costive.
There are usually signs of colicy pains, inappetence, frothy lips,
champing of the jaws, yawning, retching and vomiting. The mucosæ
become yellow and the urine red and albuminous.
The symptoms caused by old brine are more violent. There are
dullness, prostration, and inclination to lie, but at short intervals the
animal gets up and wanders round, moving stiffly, is seized by
tremors and finally convulsions, in which he falls to the ground,
dashes his head from side to side, champs his teeth, rolls his eyes and
froths at the mouth. There are usually eructations and often vomiting
which does not, however, give the desired relief. The animal becomes
rapidly weaker and though unable to rise has frequent paroxysms of
trembling and other nervous symptoms.
Lesions. With mouldy bread the congestion of the gastric and
intestinal mucosa, and of the mesenteric glands are marked features.
With brine there is in addition the heart gorged with black, tarry
blood, the skin and subcutaneous connective tissue shows a similar
dark congestion, also the brain and its membranes and the kidneys
and bladder. Petechiæ are abundant on the serous membranes and
other parts of the body.
Treatment. Evacuate the stomach by tickling the fauces, giving
tepid drinks, or ipecacuan. Follow with purgative of sulphate of soda
and diuretics especially potassium iodide. Potassium bromide,
sodium salicylate or salol may be given to calm nervous excitement
and check fermentation. Degoix recommends chloral hydrate,
enemata, cold to the head, and counter-irritants and in very
prostrate conditions stimulants may be employed.
The most important measure, however, is the cutting off of the
supply of the poison and the administration of a wholesome diet.
Medicinal treatment is too often unsatisfactory and will seldom pay
for the trouble; prevention is the one rational and economical
measure.
CRYPTOGAMIC POISONING IN CARNIVORA.
Botulism. Racial immunity. Acquired immunity. Gastric secretions, protective.
Bacteria in septic beef, old brine, stale fish, privy air. Symptoms: sudden onset,
colic, nausea, retching, vomiting, septic vomit, fever, tender abdomen, bloody,
fœtid, mucous diarrhœa, prostration, death in three to twenty-four hours. Lesions:
of gastro-enteritis, ingesta fœtid, congestions and petechiæ of other organs.
Treatment: emetic, laxative, diuretics, potassium iodide, antiseptics, demulcents,
stimulants.
Causes. What is called botulism in man is not uncommon in
carnivora. Eating carcasses of animals that have died of disease, of
poisoning, etc., in a raw condition and too often in an advanced state
of putrefaction, they are liable not only to infection by the pathogenic
or poisonous microbes, but also to direct poisoning by the ptomaines
and toxins. There are however certain protective conditions.
Accustomed as this class of animals is to the consumption of such
food, they have by selective evolution acquired an insusceptibility to
many such poisons which would prove deadly to the herbivora. Again
the mature dog or cat has already been subjected to many of these
poisons and having survived them has acquired an immunity which
renders it comparatively safe for the future. The antiseptic power of
the gastric secretion of the dog may be easily shown, by letting him
bolt a moderate piece of putrid meat, and killing him ten or fifteen
minutes later when the mass will be found in the stomach without
odor of decomposition. He succumbs to the poison either when the
quantity ingested is too large, or when the digestion is from any
cause deranged and the gastric secretion impaired. Anthrax flesh
may produce pharyngeal or intestinal anthrax in the dog. In the
animal with temporarily impaired immunity the more virulent
septicæmias may prove infecting. From putrid beef the following
pathogenic bacteria have been isolated: 1. Gärtner and Basenau have
independently isolated bacillus bovis morbificans which forms
clear colonies on the surface of peptonized gelatine, and brownish
ones beneath the surface, and coagulates milk in 24 hours. This is
short with rounded ends, very motile, non-liquefying, and capable of
surviving the freezing temperature. Its toxins are not destroyed by
boiling. It causes enteritis, or, subcutem, debility, somnolence, and
stupor. This bacillus was pathogenic to mice, rats, guinea-pigs,
rabbits, goats and calves but had little effect on dogs or cats. 2. The
bacillus of Poels which produces paralysis. 3. The bacillus of
Gatky which performs very rapid gyratory movements only, and is
not found in the muscles.
Old Brine is as poisonous for the dog as for pigs. Six to nine
ounces proved fatal, (Reynal).
Stale Fish has been known to prove poisonous in the same way.
Three dogs that were made to breathe the air over a foul privy were
seized with vomiting, fever and diarrhœa.
Symptoms. These usually develop six or more hours after a feed.
The earlier symptoms are those of digestive disorder. There is colic,
nausea, retching, vomiting of septic or bilious matter, ardent thirst,
dry mouth, furred tongue, redness of the buccal mucosa, and
tenderness of the abdomen. Diarrhœa sets in early and may become
bloody, fœtid and dysenteric. There is usually much prostration and
debility so that apart from his compulsory movements under the
colics the animal remains most of the time curled up. Fever is usually
slight but the temperature may rise to 105° F. Death may take place
in 3 hours, or may be deferred 24 hours or longer.
Lesions. There is usually gastro-enteritis, the mucosa being
congested, red œdematous, with petechiæ, and congestion and
swelling of Peyer’s patches, the solitary glands, the mesenteric
glands, the liver and kidneys. The contents of the bowel are brownish
red, and an effusion into the peritoneum is common. The spleen is
often engorged and enlarged. Congestions of the lungs and brain are
common.
Treatment. Evacuate the stomach by ipecacuan, etc., and the
bowels by a purgative. Next seek elimination of the toxins by
potassium iodide and other diuretics. Antiseptics (calomel, salol,
naphthalin) to counteract the further formation of toxins, and
demulcents by draught and enema are indicated. In cases of great
prostration, heart and nerve stimulants may be useful.
DIARRHŒA, SCOURING.
Definition. Concomitant of other affections. Causes: Congestion, effusion from
small and large intestine, irritants in bowels, or blood, chill or other shock acting
as reflex, cold drink and violent exercise, aqueous food, cooked, pulped; irritants,
feculent concretions, parasites, fermentation products, diseased teeth, jaws or
salivary glands, drink after grain, gastric hepatic or pancreatic disease, spoiled
food, purgative agents in food, fever products, purgative waters, rains, dews, damp
stalls, etc., fear, “washy” horses, nervous animals, root diet, œstrum, hepatic
torpor, equine susceptibility. Symptoms: with root diet, with much or little bile,
slight cases do not affect system, in severe cases, tympany, pawing, straining,
fœtor, in infective diseases; complications, laminitis, enteritis, pneumonia.
Treatment: remove or expel cause, demulcents, laxatives, anodynes, antiseptics;
chronic cases, iron, bitters, antiseptics, astringents, dietetics, rest.
Definition. A frequent discharge of fluid or semi-fluid evacuations
from the bowels without excessive griping or painful straining.
This is a common condition attending many diseases, rather than
a specific disease of itself yet it is such a prominent feature of these
various affections, and one so very characteristic that it seems well to
give it a special place, even at the risk of repeating much of what
must necessarily appear elsewhere.
The immediate cause of diarrhœa is a congestion of the intestinal
mucous membrane and a profuse secretion into the intestinal canal.
When such congestion occurs in the small intestine alone, it may be
counterbalanced by increased absorption in the large, so that the
secretion must be excessive to produce liquid alvine discharges.
When on the other hand it occurs in the large intestine or in both
large and small, the product is likely to escape in the liquid form.
In its turn the congestion of the intestinal mucosa may result from
irritants in the bowels, from the presence in the blood of irritant
agents which being secreted stimulate the intestinal glands to
excessive secretion, and from reflex nervous action, starting from a
distant point as in chilling or irritation of the skin or other organ.
Among direct irritants of the intestinal mucosa may be named a
full drink of cold water especially if the horse is trotted or galloped
for twenty minutes immediately after;—soft, juicy, rapidly grown
green food, to which the animal is unaccustomed, as the first grasses
of spring;—cooked or pulped food or ensilage in hard worked
animals;—many irritant and acid plants;—accumulations of hard
feculent masses in the intestines;—irritation caused by intestinal
worms especially the blood-suckers;—the presence in the intestines
of undigested matters, and resulting fermentations, the result of
diseased teeth and jaws and imperfect mastication, of disease of the
salivary glands or ducts and imperfect insalivation, of a drink of
water after a grain feed, washing a part out of the stomach in an
undigested condition, of disease of the stomach, liver or pancreas
interfering with their proper functions; unwholesome and
fermenting food like spoiled grain, or fodder, or decomposed
potatoes, apples, turnips, pumpkins, carrots, cabbages, etc.;—
stagnant and putrid water;—tumors, ulcers, volvulus, invaginations,
adhesions and other serious lesions of the bowels may act in the
same way.
As examples of the secretion of irritant matters from the blood
may be mentioned almost all the different agents used as purgatives,
and purgative agents accidentally taken in, these being as a rule
absorbed and later secreted again on the intestinal surface,
increasing the secretions in their passage:—also the morbid products
of fevers which irritate the intestinal mucosa and glands as they are
thrown out by them (rinderpest, lung plague, Southern cattle fever):
—the purgative waters on certain “scouring lands” act in a similar
way. Under the head of reflex action may be named the chills from
exposure to cold rains, night dews, damp stalls or beds, and damp,
hot buildings, seasons and localities. Under the head of nervous
causes must be included strong emotions as excitement, fear, etc.,
which lead to increase of both secretion and peristalsis. Some horses
are very subject to this and are known as “washy”. These have usually
a slim abdomen and long loin, and scour whenever they are put to
hard work. Other nervous animals with good conformation, but
which fret under saddle or in harness will scour under specially
severe work or under excitement. This is especially common in
young colts while being “broken”, and will occasionally show in
mares which are in heat. Cattle that have been on a specially
succulent diet (turnips, beets, ensilage, grass) are liable to scour
profusely if driven far or fast, and stock men seek to obviate this by
feeding some dry bran, meal, and above all fresh dry brewer’s grains
just before starting. Cows running at large when in heat are very
liable to scour. An exclusive diet of turnips or beets will keep cattle in
a chronic condition of mild diarrhœa, though not enough to interfere
with rapid improvement in flesh. Chronic diseases of the liver by
obstructing the flow of blood through the portal vein, cause intestinal
congestion and predispose to diarrhœa.
Of the various domestic animals horses are the most liable to
superpurgation, from an undue dose of aloes acting on the very large
colon and cæcum. Hence the importance of using such an agent
carefully in the young, fat or debilitated especially, of the avoidance
of cold drinks or exercise to excess after the aloes has been given, and
of keeping from work during its operation or immediately after.
Symptoms. These are of all degrees of severity from the frequent
pulpy evacuations of animals fed exclusively on roots, (beets, turnips,
potatoes), to the excessive and almost constant discharge of a dark
colored liquid mingled with more or less mucus. The discharge may
be of a light color and fœtid, indicating deficiency of bile, or of a dark
yellowish brown and odorless.
Slight diarrhœa does not affect the appetite nor general health, nor
check improvement in condition. In the more severe and continued
forms there is loud rumbling in the abdomen, loss of appetite and
condition, a rapid small pulse, accelerated breathing, pallid mucous
membranes, sunken glassy eye, and increasing debility even to an
unsteady gait. Distension of the abdomen with pawing and other
indications of abdominal pain may appear in bad cases. In the milder
cases due to simple irritation and congestion there is no tenesmus,
no excess of mucus, no formation of bubbles or froth in the stools, as
occurs in active intestinal fermentation and dysentery. In
symptomatic cases on the other hand there are superadded the
marked symptoms of intestinal inflammation, or fermentation, and
the fæces become putrid and offensive, which they do also in the
different infectious diseases (influenza, contagious pneumonia,
rinderpest, lung plague, hog cholera, swine plague, canine distemper,
fowl cholera), when the toxins and waste matters of the food and
decomposing tissues are being thrown off by the bowels.
Diarrhœa may be complicated with other diseases and especially in
the horse with laminitis.
In mild cases it tends to a spontaneous recovery, and is followed by
some slight costiveness, and if this should prove extreme there may
be some danger of complicating sequelæ such as indigestion,
enteritis, pneumonia or laminitis.
Treatment. The first consideration for the practitioner is to
discover if possible the immediate cause of the diarrhœa. If this is
found to reside in some infectious or other disease aside from the
bowel, the attention must be directed to that even more than to the
diarrhœa. If it depends on an overdose of some purgative agent or of
acrid purgative plants taken with the food, any further laxative is to
be avoided, and yet astringents and other agents which tend to lock
up the offending material in the alimentary canal must be equally
guarded against. An abundance of mucilaginous and demulcent
liquids (mallow, flaxseed gruel, boiled starch, etc.) may be given both
by the mouth and anus, to sheathe and protect the irritable mucous
membrane and to dilute and carry off the irritant contents. Moderate
doses of opium may be required to allay the violence of the spasms
and peristalsis, but this should not be pushed to the extent of locking
up the irritants. Sometimes antiseptics (naphthalin, salol) are useful
to check fermentation, and pepsin may be given to assist digestion.
In ordinary cases due to the presence of an irritant the first object
must be to relieve the bowels of this, and the second to soothe the
irritated mucous membrane. A laxative is usually all that is required,
but it must be a mild one so as not to add to already existing
irritation. Olive or castor oil are to be preferred as a rule (horse and
ox 1 pint; sheep and swine 4 ounces; dog ½ ounce), alone or with a
moderate dose of laudanum. Or rhubarb or aloes may be substituted
if desired. A dose of whisky or brandy, or oil of turpentine will often
do much to allay the secretion and peristalsis. These should be
followed by moderate doses of flaxseed gruel, or solution of slippery
elm or mallow, or simple well boiled gruels.
If the discharge persists after the laxative has had time to operate,
these mucilaginous agents may be replaced by solutions of boiled
starch, or of gum arabic, and small doses of calmatives such as
laudanum (horse or ox 1 ounce, sheep or pig 2 drachms, dog 20
drops), or prussic acid or cyanide of potassium (30 drops of the acid
or grains of the salt for horse or cow). Sub-carbonate of bismuth,
chalk, and carminatives and antiseptics may also be given. According
to the indications the practitioner must combat persistent intestinal
fermentation, or a relaxed adynamic condition of the intestinal
mucosa, or general weakness and exhaustion, with such agents as
seem best adapted to the individual case.
Chronic cases will demand the exercise of much judgment. After a
gentle laxative, salts of iron (sulphate, chloride) and pure bitters may
be given with antiseptics. Or vegetable astringents (catechu, kino)
with freshly burned charcoal and essential oils (peppermint, cloves,
cajeput) may be employed. In some instances calomel and chalk
(1:12) will serve a good end. In others silver nitrate, or arsenite of
copper succeeds. Quinine, nux vomica, pepsin, may be used to
improve tone. The diet is usually all important. Well boiled gruels,
boiled milk, arrowroot, pulped or scraped raw flesh may be
demanded in different cases. The patient should be kept at perfect
rest, and all excitement avoided.
COLIC, ENTERALGIA, INTESTINAL SPASM.
Definition. Colicy pains from spasm, enteralgia, tympanitic indigestion,
overloading of bowels, impaction, calculi, concretions, sand, foreign bodies,
intestinal and arterial parasites, irritants, enteritis, catarrhal, bacteridian,
protozoan, chemicals, strangulation, adhesion, volvulus, invagination, hernia,
trauma of stomach or intestine, peritonitis, pleuritis, metritis, ovaritis, hepatitis,
biliary calculus, nephritis, urinary calculus, neoplasms, lead poisoning. Causes of
enteralgia or spasm, idiosyncrasy, nervousness, cold, wet, high condition, debility,
cold, rain, dew, perspiration, fatigue, indigestion, rheumatism. Symptoms: horse—
sudden attack, paws, kicks, anxious look at flank, crouches, goes down, rolls, sits,
rises, shakes himself, feeds, repeats at intervals, rumbling, defecations.
Complications. Diagnosis, symptoms violent, transient, completely intermittent,
no fever, no tenderness; from acute indigestion by absence of faulty feed, loaded or
tympanitic abdomen, crepitation, continuous pain, and of careful decubitus; from
constipation by complete intermissions and freer passages; from intestinal worms
by absence of fur on anus, of rubbed rump, and of parasites in stools; from
verminous thrombosis by complete intermissions and absence of prostration, cold
sweats and of bloody stools; from enteritis and other inflammations by absence of
fever; from intestinal anthrax by the intermissions, the absence of brownish
mucosa, and perhaps of anthrax from the district; from hepatitis by absence of
icterus, tender hypochondrium, and fever; from kidney affections by lack of stiff,
straddling gait, tender loins, stretching; from pleurisy by absence of catching
breathing, tender intercostals, and friction sound; ruminants—similar symptoms
except sitting up or rolling; swine—sudden starting with grunt or scream,
vomiting, etc.; Carnivora—frequent moving, yelps, snapping, straining, looking at
flank. Treatment: solipeds, morphia subcutem, anodynes, laxative, friction,
walking, enemata, chloral hydrate: ruminants, walking, enemata, morphia,
laxative; swine, morphia, laxative, antispasmodics, injections, derivatives; dog,—
purgative, injections, chloral hydrate, ether, olive oil.
The term colic is loosely applied to all abdominal pains from
whatever cause they may arise. It is thus allowed to embrace all
diseases of the abdomen. In its more restricted sense in which it will
here be considered it may be held to indicate abdominal pain
without inflammation or any structural lesion.
It may however be well to note the most common causes of
abdominal pain so that the distinction may be more definitely
reached by a process of exclusion.
1st. Simple spasmodic colic. 2d. Enteralgia or neuralgia of
the intestines. 3d. Colics from indigestion, a tympanitic, b
from overloading with ingesta, c from impaction or
constipation, d from calculi or concretions or from sand, or
gravel taken with the food or from foreign bodies swallowed, e
from worms in the intestines, f from worms in the
mesenteric vessels (thrombo-embolic), g from irritants taken
with the food or otherwise. 4th. Colics from structural lesions
of the intestines; a from inflammation of intestine, b from
bacteridian inflammation of the bowels, c from protozoan
inflammation, d from chemical or other irritants, e from
intestinal strangulations, f from adhesions, g from volvulus, h
from invagination, i from mesenteric omental or phrenic
hernia, j from strangulated inguinal, femoral ventral or
umbilical hernia, k from wounds, ruptures or perforations
of stomach or intestines, l from peritonitis or pleuritis, m
from metritis or ovaritis, n from hepatitis or biliary calculus,
o from pancreatitis or pancreatic calculus, p from nephritis,
nephritic, uretral, cystic or urethral calculus, q from
neoplasms affecting any of the abdominal organs. 5th. Colic
due to lead poisoning.
Causes of enteralgia and spasmodic colic. Enteralgia may be
defined as a neuralgic pain of the bowel which may therefore be free
from spasm or any other appreciable structural or functional change.
Its existence in the lower animal is necessarily somewhat
problematical, as it can only be inferred from the analogy of the
animal with man, and of the enteron with the superficial parts that
are more frequently attacked with neuralgia, and also from the
absence of visible spasmodic contractions in the bowel which has
been the seat of intense pain, yet shows no inflammatory lesion. But
whether this is accepted or not, the occurrence of spasm is
undeniable and as both are functional nervous disorders the same
causative factors will apply to both.
In some nervous animals, especially high bred horses and dogs,
there is undoubtedly an idiosyncrasy which shows itself in a special
susceptibility of the nervous system. In such animals an exposure to
cold or wet, or the presence of a local irritant which would have been
without effect under other circumstances, lights up the nervous
disorder and produces an explosion, it may be as spasm or it may be
as nervous pain. Animals that are kept under the best care, that are
least accustomed to exposure and neglect, that are highly fed, and
maintained in high spirits and are impatient of control are more
susceptible than those that become inured to change and exposure,
yet are kept in moderately good condition. On the other hand the
subject which has become debilitated by overwork, underfeeding,
exhausting disease, or the generation in the system of some
depressing poison is likely to show a similar nervous susceptibility,
so that at the two extremes of plethora and nervous susceptibility, on
the one hand, and anæmia and neurasthenia on the other, we find a
corresponding tendency to nervous disorder under comparatively
slight causes. Thus it happens that a drink of ice cold water, an
exposure to a cold blast or a drenching rain or a heavy night dew may
seem to be the one appreciable cause of the trouble. If the animal has
been perspiring and fatigued the attack is more likely to occur. In
other cases a slight indigestion unattended by impaction or tympany,
or the ingestion of an irritant which on another occasion, or in
another animal would have been perfectly harmless, will induce a
violent nervous colic. In some instances the attack is supposed to be
of a rheumatic nature the causative action of the cold giving color to
the theory.
Symptoms. The attack usually comes on suddenly especially if it
has followed on a drink of cold water or a cold exposure.
Solipeds. The horse leaves off feeding or whatever he may have
been engaged in, paws with his fore feet, moves uneasily with his
hind ones or kicks with them, one at a time against the abdomen or
out backward, he looks back at the abdomen with pinched, drawn,
anxious countenance, bright anxious eye, and dilated nostrils, he
moves uneasily from side to side of the stall or box, crouches for a
few seconds with semi-bent knees and hocks and then throws
himself down violently with a prolonged groan. When down he may
roll from side to side over the back, and struggle in various ways, he
may start to rise, sit for a moment on his haunches, then go down
and roll as before. Or he may get up, shake himself and resume
feeding as if entirely well. Soon the spasms reappear, suddenly as at
first, and after a time subside as before. Thus the disease proceeds,
each succeeding paroxysm diminishing in violence until they
permanently subside, or increasing until the animal dies worn out
with shock, suffering and exhaustion. If the paroxysms are severe the
skin is usually bathed more or less in perspiration. Usually the
peristalsis continues more or less, a rumbling is heard in the bowels
and more or less fæces are passed in small solid balls or semi-liquid.
The course of the disease is usually rapid and followed by recovery.
When prolonged it may become complicated by volvulus,
invagination, indigestion or even enteritis.
Diagnosis. The characteristic symptoms are the suddenness of the
onset, the extreme suffering during the paroxysm, the reckless
manner in which the animal throws himself down, the intermissions
with complete absence of pain, the natural condition of the pulse and
temperature in the intermissions, the comfort with which the patient
shakes himself, and the absence of all abdominal tenderness,
manipulation and friction seeming to give relief rather than
discomfort.
In the colic of acute indigestion there is the previous excessive
or unwholesome meal, or the full drink after feeding; there is
tympany, or a loaded state of the abdomen proving flat on
percussion, there may be crepitation on auscultation, there is
continuous pain with exacerbations (not complete intermissions),
and there is rather a careful mode of lying down.
In intestinal constipation or other obstruction, fæces may be
passed at first in small pellets coated with mucus or they may be at
first passed freely but in steadily lessening quantities until they stop
altogether. The pain is constant but worse at one time than another
and in case of external hernia the swelling will be visible.
In helminthiasis there is the general unthriftiness, irregular
appetite, frizzled broken hair on the base of the tail, a fur of dried
mucus around the anus and the presence of parasites in the
droppings.
In verminous thrombosis, to the symptoms just named there
are added the reckless method of throwing himself down,
hyperthermia, constancy of the pain, rapidly running down pulse,
cold sweats, and profound prostration. When blood is passed per
anum it is all the more significant.
In enteritis or peritonitis the hyperthermia and the constancy
of the pains are sufficiently pathognomonic.
In intestinal anthrax there are the dusky brownish yellow
mucosæ, the marked prostration, the hyperthermia and the
constancy of the suffering. There is also the fact that the region is
subject to anthrax and bacilli may be present in the blood.
In acute hepatic disease there is hyperthermia, dusky or icteric
mucous membranes, great tenderness when percussion is made over
the short ribs, and sometimes lameness of one shoulder (usually the
right).
In disease of the urinary or generative organs the stiff or
straddling gait, tender loins, and the frequent stretching as if to
urinate, are nearly pathognomonic.
In pleurisy the hyperthermia, the transient duration of the colic,
and the tenderness on manipulating the intercostal spaces will
usually differentiate.
Ruminants. In cattle, as in the horse, the symptoms of
spasmodic colic are restlessness, constant movement, looking round
at the flanks, wriggling of the tail, uneasy lifting of the hind feet,
kicking at the abdomen, and abruptly lying down and rising again.
The animal does not roll on the back nor sit on the haunches. Fæces
may be passed in small quantity or entirely suppressed, and there
may be a slight tympany of the paunch.
Swine. The animal is attacked abruptly, starts with a grunt or
scream, moves around uneasily, lies down, rolls, gets up, and repeats
the motions. Vomiting is not uncommon, and the belly may be tense,
tympanitic and even tender. The bowels may be confined or relaxed.
Carnivora. The colicy dog is very restless, changing from place to
place, sitting on his haunches, lying down curled up, starting up
suddenly with a yelp, and repeating the restless movements. He
looks anxiously at his flank, sometimes bites at it, and cries
plaintively. The bowels are usually torpid, and defecation effected
with straining.
There are distinct intermissions but these are cut short by a new
accession of pain.
The attack is usually transient and ends in recovery.
Treatment. Solipeds. For nervous colic the hypodermic injection
of sulphate of morphia (2 grs.) is very effective. This will commonly
bring relief in less than five minutes. Should there be no effect at the
end of this time it may be repeated with advantage, but should a
second dose fail, it is well to resort to other measures. Eserine and
barium chloride are contraindicated as being liable to increase the
spasm, and if there is no irritant to expel there is no object in their
exhibition. The old prescriptions of laudanum and turpentine;
laudanum and ether; sweet spirits of nitre with belladonna, or
hyoscyamus, and other stimulants and narcotics are of little avail as
they are not absorbed from the horse’s stomach and cannot operate
until they have reached the duodenum. If given at all, their action
may often be hastened by injecting them into the rectum.
When the morphia fails it is the safest treatment to give a
moderate dose of aloes or other laxative, in combination with extract
of hyoscyamus or chloral hydrate. This takes time to pass into the
duodenum, and be absorbed and secreted anew in order to have its
full effect, and therefore it may be necessary to keep up a moderate
action of the morphia as a palliative. In four hours, however, at the
latest, the aloes can be counted on to bring permanent relief. This
appears to come as soon as the active principles have been absorbed,
the nauseating effect operating at once on the overexcited nerve
centres. The action is more perfect still when a free secretion has
been started from the intestinal mucosa, and the circulation and
innervation in the intestinal walls are essentially changed. This
measure which was long successfully practiced and advocated by the
late Joseph Gamgee, is even more perfectly adapted to the colics of
indigestion and irritation, of impaction and fermentation. There are
of course cases of complete obstruction in which it must fail, but it is
probably the most successful method for colicy affections in general.
In addition to the above, other methods of correcting the
disordered innervation are available. Active friction of the abdomen
with straw wisps is often effective, also fomenting the abdomen with
hot water. Simply leading the animal around acts as a nervous
derivative, and may be employed to prevent his dashing himself
down so suddenly as to injure himself. Then copious injections of
warm water soothe the rectum, solicit its peristalsis and by sympathy
affect the other intestines in the same way. They may often be made
more effective by the addition of antispasmodics (extracts of
belladonna or hyoscyamus or chloral hydrate).
In all cases a soft bed should be provided to secure the animal
against injury in his sudden reckless movements.
Ruminants. Simple spasmodic colic is usually transient and may
be successfully treated by driving around, giving copious warm water
injections, and using morphia subcutem. Frictions to the abdomen
with straw wisps, or with oil of turpentine should be tried. Should
these fail there is a presumption of further trouble and no time
should be lost in giving a laxative (Glauber salts) 1 to 2 pounds, or
castor oil 1 quart, with antispasmodics and stimulants as for the
horse.
Swine. The antispasmodic treatment may be tried on the pig, but
usually it is well to give a purgative at once in combination with the
narcotic. Castor oil 4 ounces, laudanum ½ drachm, or jalap 2
drachms, and extract of hyoscyamus 20 grains in electuary. Warm
injections and embrocations to the abdomen are desirable.
Dog. It is usually well to give a purgative at once (jalap ½
drachm) with 10 to 20 drops laudanum according to size. Copious
injections of warm water and a warm bath may follow. Chloral
hydrate 20 to 60 grains, may be exhibited by the rectum; also ether 1
drachm, in olive oil.
CONSTIPATION FROM INTESTINAL ATONY.
Definition. Symptomatic. Causes: habit of retention in horse, dog and cat,
indigestible matters in colon, calculi, dry food, lack of water, fever, diuresis,
diaphoresis, milking, bleeding, hepatic torpor, verminous thrombi, old age,
debility, nervous disease, matting of hairs, hæmorrhoids, abdominal suffering.
Lesions: dilatation and catarrh of bowel, disease of rectum. Symptoms: solipeds—
small, dry, coated, infrequent stools, straining, inappetence, tympany, colic,
stretching as if to urinate; dog, fruitless straining, or dry, earthy looking fæces,
coated, bloody, fœtid, anus swollen, tender, moist, palpitation, colic, vomiting,
diarrhœa may fruitlessly occur, male urinates like bitch, foul, fœtid mouth; may
last days or months; complications, sequelæ. Treatment: solipeds—exercise,
pasturage, cold water before morning feed, regular regimen, bran, flaxseed,
carrots, turnips, ensilage, common salt, Glauber salts, nux, cold injection,
glycerine, barium chloride, purgative, enemata; dog:—mechanical unloading of the
rectum and colon, injections, exercise, water, regular habits, laxative food, eserine,
oil, calomel, jalap, podophyllin, colocynth, belladonna, nux vomica, abdominal
massage, electricity.
Definition. Constipation consists in dryness, hardness, and undue
retention of the fæces. It has of course many grades and may lay
claim to many different causes, so that it might, like its antithesis
diarrhœa, be held as merely a symptom of another disease. It has
however such a definite character, that it is convenient to retain the
name to designate those cases in which the torpor or atony is the
most prominent and dominating feature, while other forms of
obstruction will be treated under different heads.
Causes. Defecation is immediately due to the active peristaltic
movements of the rectum overcoming the resistance of the sphincter.
There is also the concurrent closure of the glottis and contraction of
the diaphragm and abdominal walls, and it is usually the voluntary
operation of these forces that rouses the rectum to effective
peristalsis. The excitability of the rectum depends greatly on habit,
hence the habitual retention of fæces, gradually dulls that organ and
renders it less and less disposed to respond. In horses this is seen
largely in connection with abundant dry feeding and lack of exercise.
In house dogs and cats on the other hand, inculcated habits of
cleanliness, compels the suppression of the natural instinct, and the
habitually overloaded bowel becomes less and less responsive. The
retained excrements meanwhile give up more and more of their
liquids until they become so dry, and incompressible as well as
massive that they can be expelled only by violent efforts.
Inflammation of the mucosa naturally follows the retention and this
in its turn adds to the weakness and torpor.
Acting in a similar way the partial obstruction, by accumulations of
bones and other undigested matters in the colon, and by calculi,
tends to continued accessions of new material and to gradually
increasing intestinal paresis. So with the other forms of obstruction
which will not be further referred to here.
In all animals dry feeding and a lack of water are potent causes of
inspissation of the ingesta and torpor of the bowels.
All or nearly all febrile affections, leading as they do to suppression
of secretions, cause drying and tardy movement of the contents of
the bowels.
The excessive loss of liquid through other channels,—by diuresis,
by profuse perspirations, by excessive secretion of milk, or by
bleeding—has a similar tendency.
The suppression of the biliary secretion through liver disease, or
obstruction of the biliary duct, withholds from the intestine, the most
important of the stimuli to peristalsis, and tends to constipation,
unless the resulting irritation should cause excessive secretion.
The derangement in the circulation in the intestinal walls caused
by verminous thrombi in the horse, acts in the same way, the
imperfectly nourished walls not only losing the normal power of
peristalsis, but sometimes contracting so as to cause a stricture.
Parasites encysted in the walls of the bowels, like catarrhal and other
inflammations of these parts tend to atony and tardy peristalsis.
A weakness of the nervous system attendant on old age, or debility,
or chronic lead poisoning often tells with force on the alimentary
canal, and the loss of nervous power through disease of the great
nerve centers (ganglionic system, brain, spinal cord) impairs the
vermicular motion. This is notoriously the case in paraplegia, chronic
hydrocephalus, and vertigo.
Finally among the causes of constipation must be noted the
matting of the hairs around the anus (in dogs), and painful affections
of the anus, or the abdominal walls, which render efforts at
defecation painful and deter the animal from attempting them.
Lesions. These are as varied as the diseases which give rise to
constipation, or result from it. Permanent dilatation or sacculation of
the intestine, and the structural changes attendant on intestinal
catarrh are the most common local lesions. But proctitis,
hemorrhoids and ulcers of the anal follicles are met with in canine
patients and ulcers of the colon in the seat of impaction are common.
Symptoms. In Solipeds the fæces are passed, at long intervals, in
small quantity, usually only a very few balls at a time, firm, dry,
moulded smooth and black on the surface, often covered with mucus,
or with streaks of blood. They are passed with unusual effort and
straining, and even with groaning, and one or more balls that may be
exposed in the act are often drawn back and retained by the
inversion of the rectum and closure of the sphincter. It is liable to be
complicated by impaired appetite, tympanies, slight recurrent colics,
and dryness, scurfiness and unthriftiness of the skin. Not
unfrequently the pressure of the impacted colon (pelvic flexure)
irritates the bladder causing stretching as if to urinate, and the
passage of urine often in small quantity. There may be the symptoms
of any one of the different nervous affections that lead to impaired
peristaltic action, or of the local diseases which tend to obstruction of
the bowels.
In dogs there are violent and painful efforts to defecate, which
may be fruitless, or may lead to the expulsion of small masses of dry,
earthy looking fæces, smoothly moulded on the surface, coated with
mucus, streaked it may be with blood and highly offensive in odor.
The anus may be puffy and swollen with mucopurulent secretion
from the anal glands, which soils the hair of the hips and tail. If the
abdomen is flaccid, manipulation with both hands on opposite sides
usually detects a solid mass representing the impacted rectum and
colon, and extending from the pelvis forward, often to the sternum.
The same mass will be reached by the oiled finger introduced into the
rectum. Both methods of exploration are painful and may call forth
cries from the patient. The abdomen is usually distended, largely
from the impacted fæces, in which case it gives a flat sound on
percussion, or from gaseous emanation, in which case it is tense,
resilient and resonant. Colicy pains are liable to appear, and
vomiting at first of food only, then more or less yellow and bilious,
and finally of distinctly feculent matters. For a time appetite may be
retained, but this is gradually lost. There may supervene diarrhœa,
which in favorable cases may lead to expulsion of the impacted mass,
but in others it fails to completely dislodge it. The patient is dull and
spiritless, inclined to lie curled up in dark corners, and when raised
walks slowly and stiffly, with the tail carried straight or slightly to
one side. The male urinates like a bitch without lifting the leg. The
nose is dry, the tongue furred, the teeth usually covered with tartar,
and the breath fœtid. There is at first no hyperthermia, but some rise
of temperature attends on the advance of the disease, and the auto-
poisoning by absorbed products of the putrefaction of retained fæces.
The disease may last a few days only or it may continue for weeks
or months. In the last case intestinal catarrh, ulceration, and
circumscribed necrosis are likely to supervene and the animal may
die of auto intoxication, acute peritonitis or enteritis. Yet the
majority of cases in the dog reach a favorable termination, or recover
with remaining cicatrices, strictures or dilatations.
Treatment. In solipeds accustomed to an idle or pampered life,
plenty of daily exercise will often correct the torpor. A run at pasture
will often effectually counteract the tendency. If the patient must be
kept in the stable a full drink of cold water every morning before
feeding will often succeed. Regularity in feeding and watering is of
the utmost importance, and the addition of a little wheat bran or
flaxseed to the grain is often of material advantage. Next may be
added a moderate allowance of carrots, turnips, or ensilage to
furnish the needed succulence and organic acids. If in addition
medicinal measures are wanted, a small handful of common salt, or
of Glauber salts, in the morning drink to be taken ten or fifteen
minutes before the first feed, will usually operate well. This may be
continued for a length of time if necessary, without the ill effects of
purgatives given at other times. It may be rendered slightly more
effectual by the addition of 10 grains nux vomica on each occasion. A
morning injection of a quart or two of cold water with one or two
ounces of glycerine may be tried. Another resort is 2 or 3 grains of
barium chloride in the morning drink or hypodermically repeated
daily for some time.

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