The ptomaines or animal alkaloids and their relation to disease / by Arthur P. Luff.

  • Luff, Arthur Pearson, 1855-1938.
Date:
[1888]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The ptomaines or animal alkaloids and their relation to disease / by Arthur P. Luff. 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.

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    showed that it possessed the general properties of a ptomaine. In 1882, Bouchard demonstrated that not only were alkaloids present in appreciable quantities in normal urines, but that they augmented notably in the course of certain maladies, typhoid fever, for instance; and later, Lepine and Aubert concluded that these alkaloids in the urine increase in quantity until the crisis of a disease is reached, after which they diminish (no alkaloid, however, was isolated in connection with any disease in sufficient quantity or sufficiently pure to admit of its ultimate composition being determined). Since then, Gautier, as the result of his investigations, has affirmed, that the incessant production of alkaloids at the expense of albumenoid materials is a function of all the animal tissues, and is an essential concomitant of the vital phenomena of all living things, animal and vegetable. It is albumen, and I use this word in its widest sense, that we must regard as the common ancestor of alkaloids, whether animal or vegetable. Now, what is it that brings about these changes in the albumen molecule, that revolu- tion amongst its constituent atoms, as the result of which follows the re-arrangement of its atoms into other bodies, among which are the ptomaines ? The force necessary to effect these changes in the albumen molecule seems to be in many cases, though not necessarily in all, a force intimately associated with living matter, whether animal or vegetable, for even in the case of the corpse alkaloids, the ptomaines produced by decomposition of animal matter after death, these are formed as the result of changes induced by the vital activity of micro-organisms which set up cadaveric putrefaction. The changes induced in the albumen are such that the complex albumen molecule is split up into several less complex molecules, among which are the animal alkaloids. The following is a list of the principal ptomaines that