256 PHYSIOLOGY CHAP. 



the rabbit's bladder (after ligation of the ureters), into the vagina 

 and uterus of the same animal, and into the throat of the fowl 

 isolated between two oesophageal ligatures, and failed after 5 

 to 7 hours to detect any manifest sign of digestion in the 

 walls of these organs. He concluded that resistance to the action 

 of the digestive juices is not a property of the alimentary canal 

 alone, but is common to other living organs. 



Even if Pavy's theory explained the resistance of these organs 

 to the action of gastric juice, it is wholly inadequate to explain 

 their resistance to that of the pancreatic juice. If we assume, on 

 the contrary, that these organs, which have a copious blood-supply, 

 are the seat of vigorous absorption through the blood and lymph 

 capillaries, it is easy to explain their resistance to the action of the 

 digestive juices, since these are absorbed and removed before they 

 can penetrate and saturate the tissues a preliminary condition to 

 auto-digestion. That the proteolytic enzymes do not remain and 

 exhaust their activity in situ, but are reabsorbed, was demon- 

 strated by Brlicke, who found them in the urine, and also in the 

 muscles. 



This theory of Gaglio certainly gives a simple and straight- 

 forward interpretation of the phenomena which he studied, taking 

 them as a whole ; but it is not sufficiently general to account for 

 other phenomena, subsequently brought to light by other workers. 

 None the less, credit is due to Gaglio for having prepared the 

 field for further investigations, by directing the attention of 

 physiologists to the post-mortem auto-digestion of the intestine and 

 pancreas,and proposing the problem of the non-digestion of these and 

 other organs during life, in a more comprehensive and logical form. 



In continuation of Gaglio's experiments, Viola and Gaspardi 

 attempted to discover if the living spleen, a highly vascular organ, 

 is also refractory to the solvent action of the gastric juice. With 

 this object they introduced and fixed the spleen, with the whole 

 of its ueuro- vascular peduncle, through an aperture made in the 

 stomach of dogs and cats. 



The animals thus operated on died or were killed after 12 to 

 48 hours, and the post-mortem showed complete absence of auto- 

 digestion. It should be noted that the animals after this crucial 

 operation either ate nothing or were fed on milk, which they 

 probably could not digest, since under such conditions the secretion 

 of gastric juice would be nil or scanty. No demonstrative value 

 can therefore attach to these results. 



Contejean (1894) improved on the ingenious experiments of 

 Gaspardi and Viola by fixing an intestinal loop into the stomach 

 of dogs. In one of his most successful experiments, the dog was 

 killed 12 days after the operation, in which time twenty full meals 

 were digested. On section, it was found that the portion of 

 intestine bathed with gastric juice (4'5 cm. long, 1*5 cm. wide) 



