Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Glycogenic function of the liver / by Howard Townsend. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)
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![[Read before the New York State Medical Society, Albany, February 2d, 1864.] That the liver secretes bile has been long known, but that it performs in the animal economy another important function which is the production of a sugar, has only been known since the year 1848, when M. Claude Bernard, Prof, of Physiology in the Col- lege of France, demonstrated to his class this function, which he denominated the Glycogenic Function of the Liver. Both Magendie and Prof. R. Thompson showed long since that when large quantities of saccharine or amylaceous matters were employed as food, the general mass of the blood is found to con- tain an appreciable portion of sugar, but M. Bernard has by his experiments proven that a sugar nearly allied to glucose is a con- stant constituent of the blood drawn from the hepatic vein, ascending cava, right auricle, and pulmonary artery of all animals, whether they may have been fed upon amylaceous or saccharine substances or upon food entirely destitute of these principles. In fact, that the liver can actually generate sugar from other than amylaceous compounds, which fact Bernard demonstrated by obtaining sugar from the substance of the liver, even of ani- mals which he had fed for a long period on animal food alone, and this discovery of Bernard's was afterwards verified in the Giessen Laboratory (Liebig's). The blood in the hepatic vein of these animals was found to contain sugar, though none could be detected in the portal vein, proving that it had been elabo- rated in the liver. In herbivorous animals whose food contains a large supply of amylaceous and saccharine matter, the liver does not thus fur- nish any very large amount of this sugar, but on the contrary a portion of the saccharine constituents of the portal blood seems to be converted, in its passage through the liver, into fatty matter. In carnivorous animals, though, which have already a supply of fat in their food but no sugar, the transforming process would seem to be of a different kind, sugar being produced de novo, although it](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21159993_0005.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
