220 DIGESTION. 



tigated. The fact that Dr. Beaumont noted the action of 

 human gastric juice upon all the ordinary articles of food 

 enabled physiologists to compare with it the properties of the 

 secretion obtained from the inferior animals, an indispen- 

 sable condition in the study of the digestive fluids. In 1843, 

 Blondlot published a treatise on digestion, in which he gave 

 the results of experiments on dogs with fistulous openings 

 into the stomach. 1 This observer is generally spoken of as 

 the first to obtain the gastric juice by the establishment of 

 a fistula into the stomach in the inferior animals ; but Lon- 

 get states that in December, 1842, Dr. Bassow read a paper 

 before the Imperial Society of Naturalists of Moscow, which 

 was published in the Bulletin for that year, in which 

 he gave an account of a number of successful attempts to 

 establish a gastric fistula in dogs. 2 In the animals operated 

 upon by Bassow, the openings were not kept open by a can- 

 ula, and he was much annoyed by their tendency to close. 

 There is no reason to suppose that Blondlot was aware of the 

 experiments of Bassow, which, as Longet remarks, were little 

 known to physiologists, and, as far as we are aware, were not 

 quoted in works on physiology before the publication of 

 Longet's treatise in 1861. With some slight modifications 

 in the operative manipulations, the method of Blondlot is the 

 one now in common use. 



The establishment of a permanent gastric fistula is now 

 one of the simplest and most common of the physiological 

 operations. The dog is the animal generally used ; and from 

 the fact that he is not very subject to peritonitis the opera- 

 tion almost always ends in recovery, and the animal can be 

 trained so that the juice may be obtained in quantity and 

 with great facility. The operative procedure which we have 

 found most convenient is the following : 



1 BLONDLOT, Traite Analytique de la Digestion, Paris, 1843. 



2 LONGET, Traite de Physiologic, Paris, 1861, tome i., p. 190. Reference to 

 the experiments of Bassow is also made by Milne-Edwards, in his elaborate work 

 nowin course of publication (Lc$ons stir la Physiologic, Paris, 1862, tome vii., p. 13). 



