The infant: nutrition and management / by Eric Pritchard.

  • Pritchard, Eric, 1864-1943
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The infant: nutrition and management / by Eric Pritchard. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    facility as normal infants; in other words, rickety infants have a low “ index of utilization ” with respect to sugar; they very readily give evidence of glycosuria when fed on an excess of soluble carbo- hydrates. Araki1 and Irisawa,2 working in Hoppe-Seyler’s laboratory, proved that animals fed on a liberal diet of carbohydrates produced more lactic acid when the oxygen supply was restricted than when the allowance was unlimited. Finlay3 produced rickets in young animals by depriving them of exercise, whereas the control animals, with a free opportunity for exercise, showed no evidence of the disease. Any satisfactory theory of the pathogenesis of rickets must offer some explanation of these facts. Do the theories which have heretofore been ad- vanced harmonize with them ? The favourite theory in this country is that rickets is due to a deficient supply of fat. This seems to me an unsatisfactory explanation. Rickets certainly does occur in fat starvation, but it also occurs in infants who consume an excess of fat. Rickets has been regarded as due to the develop- ment of an acidosis—an over-production of lactic acid, carbonic acid, and other acids. 1 Zeitsch. f. Phys. Chern., vol. xv., p. 546. 2 Ibid., vol. xvii., p. 340. 3 Pfaundler and Schlossmann (second edition), vol. ii., p. 106.