Bright's disease : and allied affections of the kidneys / by Charles W. Purdy.
- Purdy, Charles W. (Charles Wesley), 1846-1901
- Date:
- 1886
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Bright's disease : and allied affections of the kidneys / by Charles W. Purdy. 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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![taking place in some part of the urinary tract external to the kidneys. As pus plays so important a part in extra-renal albumi- nuria, it may be well to review its chief characteristics, together with the various methods of production of albu- minuria due to suppurative changes in the genito-urinary tract, apart from the kidneys themselves. Pus corpuscles are made up of cellular elements and a fluid known as pus serum, which latter is mostly albumi- nous in character, and does not differ essentially from the albumin of the blood serum. Now cellular elements are insoluble in water, or in saline solutions like the urine, and hence when pus becomes mingled with urine it ren- ders the latter turbid. We, therefore, find the urine more or less turbid in extra-renal albuminuria. The amount of albumin is comparatively small in cases in which it arises from disease of the genital tract, unless the inflammation giving rise to the pus be severe. In the latter case, the pus, being of greater gravity than the urine, settles to the bottom of the vessel as a greenish-yellow mass; and if the supernatant urine be poured off, and liquor potassse added to the deposit, the latter forms with it a gelatinous, sticky mass, quite characteristic (Donne's test). Pus corpuscles are best studied under the microscope, where their appearance is found to vary with the con- centration of the urine, its reaction, and the quantity of salines contained therein. Vogel pointed out that pus corpuscles are seen in two forms in acid urine—[a] globular, and (b) irregular, sending out processes. In urine of low specific gravity (watery urine), or in alkaline urine, the corpuscles swell up two or three times larger than their normal size, and their granulation clears away, bringing out the nuclei more distinctly. If the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21073302_0021.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
