512 PARENTERAL NUTRITION 



Kautsch 83 upon a group of forty persons. Subcutaneous in- 

 jections of grape-sugar are apparently from these studies 

 well borne up to five per cent, strength ; stronger solutions 

 occasion pain. So, too, intravenous infusions of as much 

 as 1000. cubic centimetres of a five to seven per cent, solu- 

 tion of grape-sugar are remarkably well tolerated. Only 

 a small fraction of the sugar thus incorporated appears 

 in the urine. The worse the state of general nutrition the 

 greater the quantity of sugar which is tolerated. A woman 

 with puerperal sepsis, peritoneal symptoms, vomiting and 

 diarrhrea, received each day for six days a solution of sugar, 

 going as high as two litres a day, with a concentration of the 

 solution gradually increasing up to nine per cent. ; she re- 

 covered. Kautsch urges that intravenous nourishment with 

 grape-sugar be tried also in severe hysterical vomiting, in 

 serious catarrhs of the stomach and intestine, as well as in 

 cholera. Intraperitoneal injections of a five per cent, solu- 

 tion of glucose in human beings give rise, according to A. 

 Schmidt, to considerable peritoneal irritation. 84 



It was formerly thought that cane-sugar, when intro- 

 duced parenterally, passes entirely into the urine; but, ac- 

 cording to recent investigations by E. Heilner 85 and by L. B. 

 Mendel, 86 this is by no means the case. Thus, if one to two 

 grams pro kilogram of body weight be injected into cats or 

 dogs, either intravenously or intraperitoneally, only sixty- 

 five per cent, is recoverable in the urine. As above stated, 

 we must assume that there occurs a fermentative cleavage of 

 the disaccharide in the blood (perhaps by a protective fer- 

 ment formed ad hoc). After parenteral introduction of 



83 W. Kautsch (Augusta- Victoria Hospital, Berlin-Schoneberg), Deutsch. 

 med. Wochenschr., 1911, 8. 



84 A. Schmidt and H. Meyer (Dresden), Deutsch. Arch. f. klin. Med., 85, 

 119, 1905. 



85 E. Heilner (0. Frank's Lab., Munich), Zeitschr. f. Biol., 56, 75, 1911. 



M L. B. Mendel and J. J. Kleiner (Yale Univ., New Haven), Amer. Jour of 

 Physiol., 26, 396, 1910. 



87 L. B. Mendel and P. H. Mitchell (Yale Univ.), Amer. Jour, of Physiol., 

 14, 239, 1905. 



