Selected monographs.

Date:: 1888

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

115/440 (page 99)

is confirmed by experience, for the diet after which digestion-albuminuria is noticed is usually one in which animal food largely preponderates. Ohristison has noticed temporary albuminuria in persons who had eaten much cheese (87). I have already (page 19) alluded to the same symptom occurring in an otherwise perfectly healthy physi- cian, after almost every meal consisting largely of meat, and many similar cases are recorded in the literature of this subject. I am now referring not merely to the instances in which albuminuria occurred after eating eggs, for these are only partly traceable to the same cause, and in the main a different explanation is to be found for them (see page 100). It is extremely probable that under pathological conditions similar changes take place with regard to the quantity of albumen and salts contained in the blood, and especially in the direction of an increase, whether of an absolute or of a relative character. But this assumption is based only upon theoretical considerations, for we have at present no obser- vations which would prove its truth. Only in the case of cholera, and other conditions associated with profuse watery evacuations, we know from 0. Schmidt's classic investiga- tions that the albumen of the blood becomes relatively increased and that the saline constituents are similarly affected for a very brief interval (88). We know somewhat more with regard to the increase of urea in disease. Gscheid- len (89) has shown that the quantity of urea contained in the blood becomes increased in the febrile state, and the same thing will take place in all those conditions in which increased disintegration of albumen is accompanied by dimi- nution of the urinary secretion, as in phosphorus-poisoning, according to Storch, Bauer, and Cazeneuve, and, according to A. Erankel, as a result of insufficient supply of oxygen (90). In all these cases there will be an abnormally large forma- tion of urea which will be excreted with the urine, but the amount excreted may easily be less than the excessive for- mation, since, for reasons which we need not here discuss, there is a considerable and simultaneous depression of the renal activity. The result, therefore, in such cases may be an accumulation of urea in the blood, whereas in other cases in which the increased formation of urea is met by a corres-