The irritant constituent of anti-leprotic oils / by H. Paget, J.W. Trevan and A.M.P. Attwood.

  • Paget, Humphrey.
Date:
[1934]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The irritant constituent of anti-leprotic oils / by H. Paget, J.W. Trevan and A.M.P. Attwood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    It seems clear from the somewhat voluminous literature that has been already accumulated on pain causation by the injection of hydnoearpus oil or its derivatives that there are at least two factors involved. There is (a) the irreducible minimum of pain caused by the injection of fresh, neutral oil of good quality or of carefully prepared ethyl esters of pure chaulmoogric acid, or pure hydno- carpic acid, or of mixtures of these pure acids. This factor is to be regarded as inherent. The second factor (b) is artificial in origin and varies with the product under consideration. In the oil itself it is generally believed to be due to incipient rancidity or an irritant produced in the oil as a result of bad storage. In the ethyl esters it is taken to be a minute amount of irritating volatile aldehyde, or similar product, formed even in the most careful distillation of the mixed ethyl es¬ ters and removable by subsequent treatment with steam and final iodization (3). In the case of the sodium salts the most popular explanation was excessive alkalinity until Jackson (4) showed conclusively that pain on injection of aqueous solutions of the sodium salts could not be correlated with the pH of the solutions. It seemed clear to the writers that, in spite of the apparently varied nature of factors (b), pain causation might be due to a single component of the oil, and that it would be worth while to make a search for such a substance among the still unidentified constituents of a typical anti-leprotic oil. It was convenient to choose sapu- cainha oil for this purpose because we already had a large quantity of this oil under investigation, but the results obtained have been applied to and confirmed with H. wightiana oil, and there is no doubt of their general applicability to oils of this class. PART I. CHEMICAL The oil used was prepared in the laboratory by continuous ex¬ traction of sapucainha seeds with carbon tetrachloride, the last traces of solvent being removed from the oil by passage of a current of steam. The yield was 41.2 per cent. The oil gave the constants shown in Table 1, confirming its well known resemblance to Hydno- carpus wightiana oil (5, 6, 7). The total fatty acids of sapucainha oil, prepared in the usual manner, were fractionated as far as possible by cold processes, since it appeared to be clear from the work of previous authors (8, 9) that
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