On the relation between diabetes and food and its application to the treatment of the disease / by Arthur Scott Donkin.

Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the relation between diabetes and food and its application to the treatment of the disease / by Arthur Scott Donkin. 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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    grains in the twenty-four hours at the end of this period. On the following day (February 21), eggs and beef-tea were substituted for the milk, and suet discontinued, and the quantity of urine sugar fell to 927 grains. In this experiment two facts are obvious: first, that milk, added to the patient's diet, doully augmented the quantity of sugar excreted; and, secondly, that the increase was quadrupled by the further addition of suet. It appears to me that the only legitimate interpretation which can be given of these facts is that the special ingredient of milk, which so greatly increased the formation of sugar by the disease, existing as it did in an advanced stage, was butter, and that the further addition of much more fatty matter doubly aug- mented the evil.' ' The whole series of experiments, extending over two months, in the case of North, in whom the observation on each particular kind of food or diet, tried in succession, was limited to a period of one, two, or three days at the utmost, give only rough results, and are therefore vitiated and as a whole very unsatisfactory. Each indi- vidual experiment should have extended over a much longer period, in consequence of the active osmotic circulation excited by diabetic sugar, and its general diffusion throughout the body and the re- tention of water in the system (as previously described) thus pro- duced, together with the fact, to which Dr. Pavy himself has drawn attention in the case of starch, that the influence of a par-