The Medical News, Vol. 59

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Excerpt from The Medical News, Vol. 59: A Weekly Medical Journal, July December, 1891The alteration in the liver is, perhaps, chiefly that of chronic congestion with impairment of its important functions of properly transforming the products of digestion into nutritive fluid, and with deficiency in the secretion of bile.It may be interesting to consider for a moment the probable origin of these chronic catarrhs. In many there is doubtless a strong hereditary predisposition to them, often strumous in character, which is readily developed by improper food. It is my firm belief, as it is that of others, that many of these ills begin in early childhood and even in infancy, from over-eating, and from badly-cooked or improperly-selected foods, especially hot breads, and that they are perpetuated by a continuance in this unwise course. The result is that in late childhood or early adult years, the boy or girl is a confirmed dyspeptic, mentally and physically handicapped, and illy prepared to endure the hard labor that may fall to his or her lot, or to meet the exactions of a long, rigid educational course, or to satisfy the silly ambitions of parents or teachers, who would have him or her acquire endless accomplishments. There are many other causes of these catarrhal states, but it is not my purpose to consider them here, it is with the condition that we are now chiefly concerned. This established and having become chronic, what occurs? All the functions of the stomach and intestines are of course impaired, digestion is manifestly imperfect, and being retarded is attended with undue fermentations, with putrefaction, and with the evolution of various gases. Under these favorable conditions, bacteria multiply, producing ptomaines, some toxic, some inert. Noxious gases distend the hollow viscera, interfering with peristalsis, and moreover are doubtless often absorbed into the blood. Thus after meals there are constantly present soluble foods, vitiated by myriads of microorganisms and their poisonous products, and mixed with abundant mucus and altered digestive ferments - a mass ill-fitted for absorption. This, the next step in the digestive process, brings us to the second part of our subject.Dujardin-Beaumetz in his admirable lectures on "Prophylactic Hygiene, " asserts that from these putrefactive changes in the intestinal canal, the system may be poisoned in three ways: first, by the absorption of pathogenic microbes, which he terms a species of auto-infection, second, by the absorption of chemical poisons or alkaloids, formed by the action of these microbes on organic matter, viz., ptomaines, which he designates auto-intoxication, and third, by the combined agency of the pathogenic microbes and their ptomaines, which he calls toxinfections. To these I would add a fourth and a fifth, viz., by the entrance into the blood of various gases, especially sulphuretted hydrogen a sort of intestinal sewage-poisoning, as Brunton aptly describes it, and fifthly, by the retention or imperfect elimination of the various excretory products of the living cells of the organism, or, in other words, the leucomaines - a species of leucomainaemia, let us call it. Now, these toxic agents first spoken of, or many of them, along with the soluble foods, are absorbed into the blood by means of the veins and lymphatics, and thus enter the portal circulation, but it should not be forgotten that most fortunately they are not yet in the general blood-current, that that grand old organ, the liver, intervenes as a gate-keeper, as Brunton terms it, and discriminates in the most impartial manner. We know that among its other important functions, the liver is a destroyer of alkaloids, and that the bile is antiseptic, thus counteracting the effects of some of these poisons before absorption. Were this not the case, as has been correctly said, we should be in danger of poisoning after every meal. On this subject Brunton further remarks: "Were...