Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Diabetes : its cause and permanent cure / by Emil Schnée. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.
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![vivisector Pavy believed that diabetes was due to a [paralytic] enlargement of the vessels in the liver. Seegen traced the cause of diabetes to a morbid transformation of the glycogen of the liver—to an abnormal transformation of substance, which in most cases arises from a disturbance in the province of the nerve-centres. “ There is no mellituria,” he says, “ which is not injurious, even as there is no tubercu- losis which is not dangerous” (p. 18). More than one-third of Seegen’s patients also suffered of adiposis. He is of opinion that fatness predisposes to diabetes, and he considered adiposis a precursor of the formation of sugar. Dickinson also supposed that diabetes arose from a disturbance in the functions of the liver, which instead of glycogen prepared sugar out of albu- minous food. All changes and disturbances within the nervous system, according to him, cause an abnormal state of the circulation. Zimmer searches for the cause of the disease not only in the liver, but also in the muscles, which at first sounds strangely, since an increase of sugar in the blood through the action of the muscles can only be imagined in connection with, and in dependence upon, the liver. Claude Bernard maintains that a deeper disturb- ance lies at the bottom of diabetes than at that of glycosuria and glykaemia, the nature of which “ deeper disturbance ” he thinks will continue to remain unknown to us so long as that complex of physiological processes which we comprise under the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24976167_0056.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
