On the relation between diabetes and food and its application to the treatment of the disease / by Arthur Scott Donkin.

Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the relation between diabetes and food and its application to the treatment of the disease / by Arthur Scott Donkin. 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.

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    (grape sugar) in the liver by tbe agency of a fer- ment, and then to pass into the venous current of the circulation, to be consumed in the lungs; and, further, that in a state of health, the whole of the sugar formed by the liver undergoes combustion in the lungs, so that not more than a minute trace passes beyond these organs into the current of the arterial blood. Bernard further discovered by experiments on rabbits and dogs that puncture of the floor of the fourth ventricle, close to the origin of the pneu- mogastric nerves, produces a saccharine condi- tion of the urine. This effect he then attributed to paralysis of the vaso-motor nerves, and conse- quent dHatation of the blood-vessels of the liver, producing excessive functional activity of this organ and a con-espondently increased secretion of glycogen, and its conversion into sugar; so large, indeed, that only a portion of the latter can be consumed by the lungs, while the sui-plus passes into the arterial blood and is excreted in the urine, diabetes being thus produced. To use his own expression in his recent lectures,^ to be . A translation of these Lectures, delivered at f France, is given in the London Medical Eecord, Oct. and Nov. 1873.