Further observations on the skim-milk treatment of diabetes mellitus / by Arthur Scott Donkin.

  • Donkin, Arthur Scott.
Date:
[1873]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Further observations on the skim-milk treatment of diabetes mellitus / by Arthur Scott Donkin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    instead of being assimilated and undergoing their normal metamorphic changes. Consequently they are not oxidised, and the temperature of the body falls below the healthy standard. Unfortunately this is not all; for if the disease runs its course unchecked, it passes into a much more serious phase of its progress, and the albuminous or nitrogenous principles of the food also begin to contribute to the forma¬ tion of diabetic sugar, and in quantity gradually increasing as the disease advances towards its termination, until a very small proportion is left to nourish the tissues and maintain the heat of the body. Thus, Professor Griesinger * found, by careful experiment on a diabetic patient re¬ stricted to a rigorous meat diet, that only two-fifths of the whole of the albumen consumed in the food remained available for the purpose of nutrition, the rest being con¬ verted into diabetic sugar. But this does not even repre¬ sent the full extent of the malassimilation of albumen in very advanced cases. These data supply a ready and intelligible explanation of the gradually increasing and at length extreme emaciation observed in diabetics, accompanied, not by pyrexia, but an abnormally low temperature of the body, the latter con¬ dition being due to the complete absence from the blood of the oxidisable products of the assimilation of the car¬ bonaceous principles of the food, and the great deficiency of those derived from the albuminous. Hence we can readily understand the fact shown by the recent investiga¬ tions of Pettenkofer and Yoit, that in diabetes there is a diminished consumption of oxygen, and a correspondently decreased production of carbonic acid by the process of respiration. I have already referred to the necessity on the part of diabetics to refrain from starchy and saccharine articles of food, in order to prevent a return of the disease after re¬ covery. The prohibition of bread from the regimen thus prescribed is generally complained of as the greatest hard¬ ship to be endured ; consequently, various substitutes have * Archiv fur Physiolog. Heilk., 1859.