Lead poisoning in its acute and chronic forms : the Goulstonian lectures, delivered in the Royal College of Physicians, March 1891 / by Thomas Oliver.
- Date:
- 1891
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Lead poisoning in its acute and chronic forms : the Goulstonian lectures, delivered in the Royal College of Physicians, March 1891 / by Thomas Oliver. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![(]>) These expeiiiiients were repeated iii parchment membrane with varying amounts of pepsin, but with the same percentage of hydrochloric acid, and the results indicate that the active agent throughout is the hydrochloric acid contained in the gastric juice, converting the lead carbonate into lead chloride. They also illustrate the easy diffusibility of lead chloride. The advantage of Lea’s digestive tubes over the ordinary chemical test tubes is that the dissolved products pass out of the original liquid into the surrounding fluid. Looking at these results, it will be noticed that the greatest proportion of lead carbonate dissolved, is when there is hydrochloric acid alone. When pepsin is alone present with lead carbonate, not any of the metal is dissolved. The active agent, therefore, is the acid, and the influence of pepsin is rather to diminish than increase the amount of lead dissolved. (C) Having settled so far that the acid of the gastric juice is, in all probability, the active agent in dissolving lead in the stomach, our next question was to determine the influence of the digestion of proteids upon the amount of lead carbonate acted upon. Here, as in the case of salivary digestion of starch and lead, the presence of proteid in gastric digestion was found to reduce, considerably, the amount of lead dissolved, a circum- stance to be explained by either the acid of the gastric juice acting upon the lead carbonate, converting some of it into lead chloride, which, as a fairly soluble compound of lead, would unite with the albumens to form an insoluble albuminate; or the acid is first used up in the conversion of peptone, leaving, therefore, the lead carbonate unacted upon, and which, being insoluble, would pass out of the stomach with the chyme. One or two points of interest arise out of these observations he first IS, that in all probability it is in the form of lead chloride, which is a soluble and diffusible salt, that lead chiefly passes into the system from the stomach, and the reason why herbivorous animals, such as the rabbit, are not so quickly](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21921507_0151.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
