DR. PAVY AND DIABETES 17 



he came under influences l which led him to familiarise himself 

 with the work of others. 



His attitude at the last, as displayed, for instance, in the 

 lectures delivered before the Royal College of Physicians in 

 1908, was further removed from his own earlier views and nearer 

 to that of the majority than he himself seemed to realise. He 

 developed, indeed, in these later years, a knack of weaving 

 a new weft of facts into the warp of his older views while 

 gradually removing the less durable threads from the latter. 

 In the end, though he seemed unable or unwilling to recognise 

 it, the material had become of almost orthodox pattern. He, 

 at any rate, believed to the very end that he had disproved 

 Bernard's original views and all that was based directly upon 

 them. His antagonism to the glycogenic doctrine was still 

 strongly expressed in his last published lectures. 



I propose now to examine the reasons for this antagonism. 

 It was due in part to the interpretation he put upon his own 

 earliest experimental researches but more, I think, to the fact 

 that two preconceptions dominated his mind : one respecting 

 the nature of the renal functions, the other concerning the 

 fundamental nature of animal metabolism as a whole. Each of 

 these factors may be considered in turn. 



Very shortly after his return from Paris, Pavy began to 

 work upon the carbohydrate question and was led to estimate 

 the amount of sugar in the blood of the right ventricle of 

 the heart when obtained from the living animal. He found — 

 and was greatly impressed by the observation — that, as a 

 matter of fact, in life, this blood did not carry the excess of 

 sugar which Bernard had shown it might contain postmortem 

 nor that which apparently it ought to contain according to the 

 glycogenic doctrine. This led him to suspect that the supposed 

 excess of sugar in the liver was due to post-mortem changes. 

 After developing a technique for the avoidance of such changes, 

 he showed experimentally that there was no excess in the organ: 

 that if such be ever observed, it is only when the liver has suffered 

 damage at the hands of the operator. The glycogenic doctrine 2 



1 I happen to know that in later life he was most grateful to Prof. Brodie and 

 to his own private assistant and colleague in research, Mr. Siau, for breaking down 

 at this time the habit he had acquired of isolating himself intellectually. 



2 In its later form, that is to say. When Bernard first initiated it, the seat 

 of oxidation was supposed to be in the lungs. 



2 



