The pulse / by W.H. Broadbent ; illustrated with 59 ophygmographic tracings.

  • William Broadbent
Date:
[1899?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The pulse / by W.H. Broadbent ; illustrated with 59 ophygmographic tracings. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    ammonia, derived from the decomposition of urea or some nitrogenised waste of a lower degree of oxida- tion than urea or uric acid which was imperfectly oxidised and broken up, because the blood was already charged with products of combustion. Experimental investigation rendered the idea that ursemic symptoms were due to urea altogether untenable. Urea injected into the blood, in what- ever quantity, did not give rise to convulsions, and when convulsions resulted from some experimental interference with the. renal excretion there was no abnormal amount of urea in the blood. The same conclusion was reached when the hypothesis that the symptoms were due not to urea, but to the products of its ammoniacal decomposition in the blood or tissues was ex]3erimentally tested. First one substance, then another obtained from the urine, has been considered by different experimenters to be the toxic agent to which the convulsions and other ursemic symptoms were attributable. It seemed, indeed, to be almost a reductio ad absurdum when the potash salts were found, after most careful and skilful and apparently exhaustive investigation by Feltz and Ritter, to be the most powerfully toxic of the constituents of urine. If the theory of Traube, which refers the con- vulsions and other ursemic symptoms to cerebral anaemia, the result of cedema, be slightly modi- fied, it seems to me that all the phenomena fall within the range of its explanation. For the pro- duction of the cerebral ansemia, Traube considered a watery state of the blood and hypertrophy of the heart to be necessary, and these conditions are not always present : there may be no hypertrophy of the heart, for example, when convulsions come on early in acute renal dropsy, and there may not be a watery state of the blood in contracted granular kidney with