Selected monographs.

Date:: 1888

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

117/440 (page 101)

and Barreswil, Hammond, CI, Bernard, J. Chr. Lehmann, and Stokvis, have observed albuminuria after eating many eggs, or a long-continued diet of this character, the experi- ments being performed on themselves, or on other persons, or on rabbits and dogs (91). As a general rule, this albumi- nuria is explained as due to the readiness with which egg-albu- men passes through a filter ; it is consequently supposed to traverse the glomerular vessels more readily than is the case with the normal albuminous substances of the blood ; and I have already drawn attention to the fact (see p. 23) that this generally received explanation involves a recognition of the theory according to which the albuminous substances really do pass through those vessels, though in quantities varying according to the capacity for filtration possessed by each. The investigations of Lehmann, Stokvis, and Oreito (92), show beyond doubt that egg-albumen is really excreted as such, and that in the majority of cases the albuminuria disappears with its excretion. It must, therefore, be assumed that in those cases in which a large number of eggs are in- troduced into the stomach, a portion at least escapes the action of the gastric juice and passes unchanged into the blood; and this theory is supported by the fact that Stokvis failed to produce albuminuria in rabbits when he introduced coagulated albumen into the stomach. The portion really digested may, however, by increasing the quantity of normal albumen in the blood, have contributed to the production of albuminuria in the way just described (see page 97, et seq.). It appears, however, as if the admixture of dissolved egg- albumen might lead to the production of albuminuria in yet another way, for both Lehmann and Stokvis several times observed that a long-continued albuminuria was the result of injecting the albumen in question into the blood, and that more albumen (in one of Stokvis^s experiments, four times as much) was excreted than was injected. In these cases, therefore, the presence of an extraneous albuminous substance in the blood must have set up, probably in the kidney, some kind of process which led to the production of albuminuria in the strict sense of the word—that is to say, to the excretion of coagulable albumen of the system itself. Here we are re- minded of the fact that Creite often witnessed the occurreuce