Studies in intracranial physiology & surgery : the third circulation, the hypophysis, the gliomas / by Harvey Cushing.
- Harvey Williams Cushing
- Date:
- 1926
Licence: In copyright
Credit: Studies in intracranial physiology & surgery : the third circulation, the hypophysis, the gliomas / by Harvey Cushing. Source: Wellcome Collection.
94/168 page 78
![chief source of confusion lay in the fact that diuresis pro- yoked by posterior-lobe extracts is but a transient effect, and it was not until the acute physiological experiments on which this opinion was based # were checked by long- enduring observations, that the extract was found to have precisely the reverse effect, namely to provoke an oliguria rather than a polyuria. The experiments of Ketil Motzfeldt carried out in the Harvard Laboratory (1917)32 were among the first to make clear the existence of these anti-diuretic properties, and thus to explain the apparent disharmony of the physiologists and clinicians ; for it had been clinically observed by both Farini and Von den Velden (1913) that the extract given hypodermically, contrary to expectation, would actually inhibit the polyuria of diabetes insipidus. This was a disclosure which justifies all the time and thought which many have given to the subject of these polyurias, for it has put into our hands what Andrew Cameron was after, namely a practical therapeutic treatment for the amelioration of a most distressing disease. Still, we are no nearer an actual explanation of diabetes insipidus. For if the disorder is due to an injury of some centre in the tuber cinereum, it is remarkable that it is so rarely an accompaniment of the craniopharyngeal-pouch tumours which compress and deform not only the tuber where the centres supposedly lie but the hypophysis itself. It was for the purpose of reconsidering the interpretations which Bailey and Bremer had put upon their experiments, # The results are now partly explainable by the action of posterior-lobe extracts in contracting smooth muscle other than of the blood vessels [Dale for the uterus (1906), Cramer for the eye (1908), Blair Bell and Hick for the bladder (1909), Houssay for stomach and intestine (1911)]: and with this interpretation many of the studies of experimental hypophysial diuresis like those of Shamoff 28 may still be regarded as positive in so far as they suggest the liberation of posterior-lobe extract and its action on the bladder musculature, even though there may not have been an actual diuresis.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b29929209_0094.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
