Hints for clinical clerks in medical cases / Westminster Hospital.

  • Westminster Hospital
Date:
[1863?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hints for clinical clerks in medical cases / Westminster Hospital. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    combine with ] grain of urea; and therefore it is not difficult to calculate the amount of urea present from the quantity of the pernitrate of mercury used before reaching the faint yellow precipitate. This test is of course one which can only be used in good daylight. For the detection of bile in the urine.—Pour a few drops of urine upon the back of a clean white plate, and add one or two drops of nitric acid to them. If bile be present in small quantity a greenish dis¬ coloration is the result; if bile be present in large quantity, the acid produces a curious rapid play of changing colours—pale green, violet, pink, and yellow. These phenomena are more conspicuous still when the urine is evaporated considerably. For the detection of chlorides in the urine.— To a small quantity of urine, add first about a sixth part of its bulk of nitric acid, and then drop in a few minims of a solution of nitrate of silver. If chlorides are present, the urine becomes more or less hazy or turbid, according to the quantity of white precipitate of chloride of silver which is thrown down ; if chlorides are absent, no such haziness or turbidity is produced. On the diagnostic significance of casts, &c.— “ Attention to the microscopic character of these casts will at any time enable the practitioner to estimate the nature and intensity of the disease [Bright’s disease], its advance or decline, its form and its probable termination. The blood-casts re¬ present the period of active hyperaemia and haemor¬ rhage, the coarsely granular epithelial cast, with its compound exudation corpuscles, accompanied by amorphous granular flakes stained with haematin, the period of inflammatory exudation ; the finely granular, semi-transparent casts, with scattered epi¬ thelial and granule cells, the subsidence of that stage. Transparent casts, with compound cells, with isolated resplendent molecules, and grape-like clusters of