An inquiry into the proximate cause of gout and its rational treatment / by Anthony White.
- White, Anthony, 1782-1849.
- Date:
- 1848
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: An inquiry into the proximate cause of gout and its rational treatment / by Anthony White. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
12/20 page 12
![tate of lithates which so often accompanies the gouty paroxysm. In some instances there was no precipitate at all; and in others it was very slight. And the specific gravity of the urine was rather below than above the ordinary standard, indicating that no ex- cessive quantity of either urea or lithic acid was held in solution.” The gouty poison, then, is not identical with lithic acid, but is so near akin to it that the chemical and pathological characteristics of the latter may probably yet serve as indices to guide us to the discovery of the former. “ Organic chemistry,” says Dr. Holland, “ has taught us how readily the elements out of which all animal matter is formed are displaced from one com- bination and enter into others; and how very slight, frequently, are the differences, indicated by analysis, between substances eminently noxious to the system, and those indifferent or beneficial to it. We owe, further, to recent experiments the explicit proof of what simple observation had partly shown before-—the remarkable effect upon the whole mass of the blood of minute quantities of certain matters brought into the circulation,—leading to the inference of analogous effects from an increased proportion of one or other of its principles accumulating or being unduly retained in the body. * * * These circumstances, now familiar to us, do certainly not identify the material cause of gout with any of the animal excretions just named [lithic acid, urea, the lithic or purpuric salts, &c.] ; but they tend to concentrate our views towards them, and give a much more specific direction to future re-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22371990_0014.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
