The sympathetic nervous system in disease / by W. Langdon Brown.

  • Walter Langdon-Brown
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The sympathetic nervous system in disease / by W. Langdon Brown. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    68/182 (page 54)
    CHAPTER III THE SYMPATHETIC NERVOUS SYSTEM IN RELATION TO GLYCOSURIA Consideration of the influence of the sympathetic and the endocrine glands on glycosuria follows naturally from my previous topics. I also propose to discuss the ques¬ tion of the relationship of the blood-sugar to glycosuria. I do not suggest that this will solve all the problems of diabetes. There is much of truth in Abderhalden’s remark that “Up to the present, the most prominent symptom, that of glycosuria, has dominated the entire investigation of problems concerning diabetes, and it is very probable that this is the reason why the disease is, as a whole, so little understood.” I have long felt that it is a mistake to look upon the disease merely as a dis¬ turbance of carbohydrate metabolism because that part of the disease was first recognized. More than two centuries elapsed between Willis’s recognition of sugar in the urine and Gerhardt’s discovery of the ferric chloride reaction in severe diabetes. It took some years after that before the significance of this reaction in relation to fat metabolism was realized. Still later came the recog¬ nition of the disturbed protein metabolism in diabetes, and now we are finding out that the metabolism of the inorganic salts is perverted as well. We must look upon diabetes as a disease of metabolism as a whole, though it is probable that the history of our knowledge of diabetes repeats itself in each patient, the carbohydrate disturbance preceding the others.