FASTING STUDIES 



14. The elimination of urinary indican during two fasts of over 



one hundred days each 



CARL P. SHERWIN AND PHILIP B. HAWK 



(Laboratories of Physiological Chemistry of Jefferson Medical College and the 



University of Illinois) 



Introduction, Such fasting experiments as entailed the deter- 

 mination of indican in the urine were reviewed by us in a previous 

 article (i). Comparatively few such experiments have been con- 

 ducted. 



The series of tests reported in this paper were made upon the 

 fasting dog Oscar (2). The fasts were 117 and 105 days in length, 

 respectively. A description of the diet previous to the fast of 117 

 days, and a general discussion of that experiment, will be found 

 elsewhere (2). The 105 day fast was conducted in a manner sim- 

 ilar to the 117 day fast. The conditions differed only in the fact 

 that the 105 day fast was a "repeated" fast (3). The indican 

 method employed was Maillard's modification of Ellinger's method 

 (4), as previously described (5). 



ExPERiMENTAL AND DISCUSSION. Instead of separatcly analyz- 

 ing the urine of each day of the fast, composite samples, represent- 

 ing different intervals, were prepared and analyzed. The data for 

 the fast of 117 days are given in Table i whereas Table 2 contains 

 the data for the fast of 105 days.^ 



The data indicate that there was intestinal putrefaction through- 

 out the fast of 117 days. This is an interesting finding in view of 

 Müller's (6) failure to find any indican in the urine of the pro- 

 fessional faster Cetti after the third day of the fast. In previous 



1 On the sixty-first day of the 117 day fast, 100 c.c. of the urine were evapo- 

 rated to 50 c.c. and the concentrated Solution analyzed. Again on the sixty- 

 second and sixty-third days 150 c.c. of each day's sample were taken and evapo- 

 rated to 50 c.c. before analysis. 



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