142 THE ADRENALS AND THE GENERAL OXIDATION PROCESSES. 



storehouse for oxygen, with the spleen, also remarkable in this 

 particular, as a close second. But the kidneys do not in the 

 least appear to stand, as thought by many, in the light of 

 uric-acid forming organs, but, on the contrary, as the main 

 organs to be protected, since it is upon their tissues that the 

 brunt of the disorganizing effects of the alloxuric bases is ex- 

 ercised. "We are indebted to Levison 11 and others for the 

 knowledge that granular atrophy of the kidneys is a constant 

 precursor of gout," says Croftan. 12 Such a morbid process 

 would precisely coincide with the effects upon renal tissues that 

 free alloxuric bases would be expected to produce. 



Yet, the labors of Garrod, Luff, and others have empha- 

 sized the fact that uric acid is not present in the blood during 

 health either in mammals or birds. This is difficult to recon- 

 cile with the view that the kidneys are not uric-acid-forming 

 organs, since its presence in the urine exceeds in quantity that 

 of the alloxuric bodies. But, according to von Noorden, 13 the 

 Heintz method of ascertaining the presence of uric acid in the 

 blood is so faulty that Garrod's painstaking analyses and those 

 of the many able successors have lost all scientific value in this 

 particular. Bouchard, Sprague, Pfeiffer, Vogel, and Croftan, 

 on the other hand, using more modern methods, have invari- 

 ably found uric acid in normal blood, thus indirectly eliminat- 

 ing the kidneys as the uric-acid-forming organs. 



Haig's faithful work in this direction must not be over- 

 looked. While his view that uric acid is the source of the 

 manifestations of toxicity witnessed is not sustained by mod- 

 ern research, his numerous analyses distinctly prove two points 

 which modern experimentation has fully upheld: i.e., that the 

 uric acid found in the urine is a fluctuating quantity, and that 

 various foods are capable of augmenting this quantity. The 

 kidneys once eliminated from the depurative process, we are 

 relegated to the blood as the main source of the uric acid, and 

 therefore to the blood as the seat of the reaction, which con- 

 sists in the conversion of varying quantities of toxic alloxuric 

 bodies into equally variable quantities of benign uric acid. 



"Levison: Zeitschrift f. klin. Med., vol. xxvi, p. 31V. 



12 Croftan : Loc. cit. 



13 Von Noorden: Quoted by Croftan, loc. cit. 



