Lectures on some of the applications of chemistry and mechanics to pathology and therapeutics / by H. Bence Jones.

Date:
1867
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on some of the applications of chemistry and mechanics to pathology and therapeutics / by H. Bence Jones. 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.

    54/368 (page 44)
    far more probable that the temporary diabetes is owing to the mechanical injury of the nervous system so affecting the vessels that the chemical changes are interrupted. The same phenomenon is seen in every fermentation. The chemical action is temporarily stopped when the fermenting fluid is disturbed by any sudden change. These conditions of change may in diabetes be affected singly or all simultaneously. When the affection reaches to the extent of stopping the chemical change in the vegetable or animal sugar in the body, diabetes, intermittent or per- manent, is the result. That the disease is only a little way distant from health is shown by the existence of sxigar in the urine in the healthy state; so that a small quantity of sugar in the urine is no proof of disease; and here, as elsewhere, there is no defined limit where health ends and disease begins. Diabetes is the arrest of a liealthy state; an increased quantity of sugar appearing in the urine, because the actions that constitute health are lowered. In perhaps half the cases of diabetes the arrest of change in the food-sugar constitutes the complaint. This is proved by the fact that when a strict antifarinaceous diet is observed the abnormal amount of sugar ceases, and the patient is well as long as he keeps to the strict diet. When this fact was published in 1806 by Dupuytren and Thenard, they used these words:—Que le traitment qui consiste surtout dans un regime purement animal a le meme degre d'efficacite que le quinquina dans les fievres intermittants.—Annales de Chemie, vol. lix., p. 45. But it was soon found that cases occurred in which a strictly antifarinaceous diet, consisting of animal food and water, did not stop the sugar in the urine. For days and weeks not a grain of vegetable starch or sugar may be taken as food, and yet sugar in excess will exist in the urine. Whence does this sugar come ? It must either be taken in the animal food or it miist be produced in the body. Previous to Bernard's discoveries, this production of sugar when no vegetable food was taken admitted of no explanation.