On the frothing of urine and other organic liquids / by Robert Kirk.

  • Kirk, Robert
Date:
[between 1880 and 1889?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the frothing of urine and other organic liquids / by Robert Kirk. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    5/16 page 267
    years, which I have made on the bubble of albumen and the froth of various specimens of urine may, it is hoped, prove of some interest. When we blow a current of air through an albuminous liquid, as blood serum or a solution of ovalbumen, a remark¬ able formation of bubbles rises to the surface. This phenom¬ enon is familiar to all, although it does not seem to have received much notice. The bubbles, when blown up in a large glass jar, are for the most part of a pentagonal form on the sides of the vessel; they are much tougher, thicker, and stronger than soap bubbles, and do not refract light strongly like the latter. It is remarkable how they persist after very great dilution of the albumen. If we dilute blood serum with 200 or 300 volumes of water, and put a small quantity of the liquid into the bottom of a tall glass jar of about the same cubic capacity as the lungs of an adult, and by means of a glass tube blow a full expiration through it, the bubbles will still rise to the top of the jar with scarcely a single gap amongst them. Blood serum or hydrocele serum may still be distinguished from mere water bv the bubble after dilution O ^ with more than a thousand volumes of the latter. The fluid from an ordinary hydrocele, supposing it could be blown out after dilution in a continuous sheet, would form a bubble membrane many square miles in extent. By comparing different forms of albumen, by diluting them in this manner, I arrived at the conclusion that serum albumen possessed this property in a somewhat higher degree than ovalbumen. Equal quantities, as far as could be determined by the nitric acid or boiling tests, were compared with each other. My^ observations have been chiefly confined to the urine, and especially to albuminous urine. It is evident that the spontaneous production of froth or air bubbles on the surface of any urine must depend on two causes;—(1) a certain property of the liquid, and (2) the presence of gas in it. If any gas arise from decomposition, or air be introduced by agitation, these bubbles will form in proportion as the liquid possesses the property which gives rise to them. What class of urines most readily produces gases, or to what extent the production of such gases is to be regarded as pathological, I have not made the subject of observation my attention has been solely directed to the degree in which various urines possess the property which enables these^ bubbles to form when a current of air of given amount is driven through them. Proceeding in this way I obtained the following results.
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