Selected monographs.

Date:: 1888

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

119/440 (page 103)

may be assumed in the case o£ propeptonuria. It is well known tliat the colouring matter of the blood is dissolved, not merely as a consequence of the injection, but likewise under various circumstances, as a result of the destruction of the red corpuscles in the blood. In this way its excretion takes place, and thus we find hsemoglobinuria (meth^moglo- binuria, hjematinuria) as a result of various poisons, and m certain states of disease (periodic hsemoglobinuria, severe in- fectious conditions), and, as Creite, Landois, and Ponfick have observed, after the introduction into the circulation of blood, or only blood-serum, of an animal belonging to a different species (94). The excretion of the haemoglobin, however, appears to take place not only by filtration through the glomerular vessels, but besides this, as is the case with other colouring materials, in a specific manner through the epithelium of the uriniferous tubules (95). This, then, is almost all that is known with certainty with regard to the dependence of albuminuria upon qualitative changes of the blood, and particularly upon alterations of the albuminous substances. All the results of experiments in reference to this question amount apparently to this, viz. that albuminous substances, normally not dissolved in the blood, appear in solution in that fluid, and that they are excreted by the kidneys in proportion to their capacity for filtration, just as was to be anticipated from the views we have developed with reference to the filtration in the glomerular vessels. In consequence of the greater capacity for filtration possessed by these substances a larger amount passes through the glomerular vessels than in the case of the normal albuminous substances of the blood; it therefore follows that the former will be more easily discoverable in the urine than the latter, and the albuminuria is mainly accounted for by this fact. It would, moreover, appear that abnormal excretion of the ordinary albumen may be induced as a result of extraneous admixtures of this description. It might be thought that these facts amounted to suffi- ciently presumptive evidence in favour of the view that many forms of albuminuria are dependent upon qualitative changes of the blood, and particularly of its albuminous constituents. It is true that this view has met with but