"MOCK MEAL" 3 



easy path along which the student is invited to trudge with 

 the author. Yet it is scarcely in harmony with the duty 

 of a guide that at the very beginning of an ascent he should 

 paint fearful pictures of its difficulties. It is very much 

 better to take up the way confidently and without misgivings, 

 and to postpone to convenience all matters of reflection. 



Without further introduction, therefore, the subject- 

 matter of the lecture may be taken up : 



PROTEIN DIGESTION IN THE STOMACH 



In all the mammalia, it need scarcely be said, the food 

 after mechanical preparation by mastication passes to a 

 reservoir, the stomach, where its proteid constituents under- 

 go at once the first phase of digestion under the influence of 

 the peptic ferment of the stomach. 



"M.ock Meal" and Pawlow's Ventriculus. Investiga- 

 tions bearing upon the secretion of the gastric digestive 

 juice in subjects having operative or traumatic gastric fis- 

 tulas date back to the first half of the past century. A sys- 

 tematic experimental study of the problem of the secretory 

 function of the gastric mucous membrane was first made 

 possible when Pawlow la perfected a satisfactory technic 

 of artificial production of gastric fistula. 



In his method the oesophagus is diverted in the neck, 

 in a dog in which a gastric fistula has been produced, to the 

 surface and the orifice is stitched into the skin wound; so 

 that by the passage of a "mock meal" considerable quanti- 

 ties of pure gastric juice without admixture of food sub- 

 stances may be obtained from the fistula, as all the food 

 given the hungry animal passes out of the upper part of the 

 gullet to the exterior, while at the same time the nervous 

 secretory stimulus ("psychic secretion") excited by the act 

 of chewing operates without complicating f actors. 



Pawlow contributed another important step by his modifi- 

 cation of Haidenhain's method of making a ventriculus or 



W. P. Pawlow, Arbeit der Verdauungsdriisen, Wiesbaden, 1898; and 

 Nagel's Handb. d. Physiol., 2, 699-762, 1907. 



