The healing art and the claims of vivisection : a lecture delivered at Cambridge, March 10th, 1890 / by Edward Berdoe.

  • Berdoe, Edward, 1836-1916.
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The healing art and the claims of vivisection : a lecture delivered at Cambridge, March 10th, 1890 / by Edward Berdoe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    does not sound very scientific, but I am not responsible for that. The consequence of this decision of Dr. Rutherford was that many medical practitioners who desired to treat their patients on ]purely scientific princi]ples, discarding empiricism as much as possible, and ado^Jting all the latest ojpinions of the physiological school, gave up the use of calomel and blue pill as liver medicines, not because these remedies had not done good service in clinical practice, but because experiments had proved that those beneficial results were only imaginary. In 1877, however, Dr. Rutherford set to work to see if he had not admitted some fallacy into his experiments, and so he performed another set to correct the errors of the first. He says that possibly the calomel's non action on the liver was due to an absence of bile from the intestinal canal. So in this second series he mixed his calomel with bile and then injected it into the abdomen; then he got into a greater dilemma than before, the muddle increased, and the whole business seemed in hopeless confusion. It was then suggested that when we take a dose of calomel into the stomach by natural means and not by a surgical operation into the duodenum, it gets mixed with the gastric juice and saliva which partly con- vert it into mercuric perchloride, commonly called corrosive subHmate. So Dr. Rutherford set to work with calomel digested in water with hydrochloric acid, which is the acid of the gastric juice. Here, however, another muddle was made, for the unnatural conditions introduced another fallacy. In fasting dogs a certain mucus accumulates in their stomachs