An inquiry into the proximate cause of gout, and its rational treatment / by Anthony White.

  • White, Anthony, -1849.
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

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 National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    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 combination and enter into others ; and how very slight, frequent- ly, are the differences, indicated by analysis, between substances eminently noxious to the system, and those indifferent or beneficial to it. We owe, further, to re- cent experiments the explicit proof of what simple ob- servation had partly shown before—the remarkable effect upon the whole mass of the blood of minute quantities of certain matters brought into the circula- tion,—leading to the inference of analogous effects from an increased proportion of one or other of its princi- ples 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 research. The assured connection of the gouty with the calculous diathesis,— the chemical nature of the concretions and deposits in the former,—and the evidence that these deposits often become in part a substitute for the more active forms