140 THE ADRENALS AND THE GENERAL OXIDATION PROCESSES. 



by A. C. Croftan. 7 True, it may have been found in very 

 marked quantities in the serum of some gouty subjects during 

 the active stage, as observed by Garrod; but, if the acute 

 symptoms of this disease are due to uric acid, why do they 

 not appear in such conditions as leukaemia, in which uric acid 

 is also present? Uric acid is insoluble in the body-fluids, and, 

 if it irritates the renal structures at all, it can only do so 

 through the asperities of its crystals, since as a chemical body 

 it is innocuous. Even the view that gouty disorders should be 

 ascribed to its influence alone hardly stands, since Pfeiffer and 

 Vogel and other investigators have found that the proportion 

 of uric acid, when ascertained by modern methods during or 

 between attacks of gout, shows but little variation. 



Urea is also a benign substance; Bouchard found in a 

 series of painstaking experiments that it was even less toxic 

 than sugar. Whereas it took 2.5 grammes of bicarbonate of 

 soda to kill 1 kilogramme of animal, from 5.5 to 6.3 grammes 

 of urea were required to reach the same result. Water and 

 normal albumin alone, of the animal fluids, are less toxic than 

 urea. As to its influence on the kidneys, Bouchard was led to 

 conclude that, although a product of disassimilation, it played 

 a useful role in the economy as a diuretic. 



Quite another story is unfolded, however, when the allox- 

 uric bases are analyzed from the same standpoint. As products 

 of worn-out nuclei which have served their purpose in elabo- 

 rating blood-corpuscles, both red and white, and other cellular 

 elements, their effects are those of powerful alkaloids. Eeadily 

 soluble in the relatively large proportion of menstruum which 

 the body-fluids afford them, they are carried in all directions, 

 and become the source of the various phenomena usually 

 ascribed to "gouty diathesis" and now credited to them by the 

 more recent writers. Gaucher 3 and Kolisch, 9 in the order 

 named, long ago referred to the alloxuric bases xanthin, 

 hypoxanthin, adenin, and guanin as violently toxic agents, 

 while Levison ascribes to them the renal lesions which are 



'A. C. Croftan: Journal of the American Medical Association, July 8, 1899. 

 s Gaucher: These de Paris, 1884. 



Kolisch: Wiener med. Wochenschrift, 1895; quoted by F. Levison, "Sajous's 

 Analytical Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine," vol. ill. 





