9$ PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY IN MEDICINE. 



sulphocyanate a state which is characterized by a strong, 

 steady heart action and stimulation of the vagus nerve 

 and vascular centres it is possible to bring about an 

 immediate standstill of the heart, not preceded by an in- 

 crease in blood-pressure, by injecting an amount of a 

 barium salt which, under ordinary circumstances, scarcely 

 affects the heart at all, or, if it does, only stimulates it. 

 Such a heart-failure may under circumstances occur 

 after the injection of five milligrams of barium chloride 

 into a medium-sized dog. Since this effect can be ob- 

 tained even in a completely atropinized heart, or after 

 the exclusion of the greater circulation and the nerve- 

 centres, it is probable that the salt affects the heart 

 directly. Just as in test-tube experiments with protein, 

 barium, which is characterized by a remarkable affinity 

 for the musculature of the heart and the blood-vessels, 

 is able to join such, large amounts of neighboring sulpho- 

 cyanate ions to the heart muscle in such remarkably 

 short time that an acute, deadly sulphocyanate intoxi- 

 cation results. How small amounts of sulphocyanate 

 suffice in order to bring about a heart failure, if only it 

 reaches its point of attack within the cells, was indicated 

 in the experiments described above with sulphocyanate 

 esters. Calcium and strontium act in the same way as 

 barium, only, because of their lesser affinity for the 

 musculature of the heart, larger doses are required 

 (PAULI and A. FROHLICH). 



The physiological antagonism between many ions which 

 we supposed to exist from a certain parallelism between 

 the behavior of dead and of living protein, and which has 

 been proved to exist experimentally, had been previously 

 discovered in another way by the well-known American 



