NATURE AND HISTORY. 371 



the blood of certain noxious materials, which, from some dis- 

 turbance, have remained unbroken up and unremoved, or which 

 have resulted from peculiar changes of received or existing 

 elements. In azoturia the cause of the existence of this dele- 

 terious agent, whatever it may be, does not in any case appear 

 to be resident in the kidneys, but is clearly one of assimilation 

 in some of its complex processes, and is undoubtedly intimatel}^ 

 associated with a form of mal-nutrition, with the entrance 

 into the system, and into the blood, of material highly charged 

 with the materials or power of determining or forming azotized 

 or nitrogen compounds. 



In considering the rationale of the process of the entrance 

 and passage through the system of a superabundant supply of 

 albuminoid materials, their change, degradation, and formation 

 into other compounds, which from their character are eminently 

 unfitted for fulfilling the function of healthy nutrition, there 

 seems to us nothing impossible or improbable in supposing 

 that the diagnostic feature of musculo-nervous disturbance may 

 originate in part both from disturbedj^innervation and from 

 perverted nutrition. 



The extreme suddenness of the seizure, the difficulty of 

 imagining that the great masses of muscle involved could be 

 affected otherwise than by being acted upon and influenced by 

 nerve-power, together Avith the rapid rise of temperature, and 

 the oftentimes quick subsidence of these muscular phenomena, 

 are so far presumptive of primary disturbance of nerve-force 

 beino- the inducinsf factor. On the other hand, if we believe that 

 for some time prior to the violent exhibition of these symptoms 

 diagnostic of this condition, there has been gradually developing 

 an altered, perverted, and depraved condition of the nutritive 

 fluids of the body — fluids which have all the time of this change 

 or alteration been circulating through blood and l}anph channels, 

 with the purpose of supplying the needful nutriment to the 

 various tissues, we can hardly suppose that muscular tissue, so 

 largely irrigated with nutritive fluid, should not, to some extent, 

 sufter in its nutrition from unhealthy pabulum. Still, if this were 

 the only mode, or even the chief one, through which unwhole- 

 some and poisonous tissue-nutriment was operating, it might 

 be expected that its operation would be gradual rather than 

 sudden and violent. Besides accounting for musculo-nervous 



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