WATER AS A DIETARY CONSTITUENT 



287 



having largely left the stomach and even the duodenum. The general 

 consensus of opinion is that water leaves the stomach rapidly, the bulk of 

 it in the first few minutes along the so-called "Rhine," or trough, in the 

 lesser curvature, this being particularly true of the empty stomach. 

 Waldeyer and Kauffmann established the presence of this trough on 

 anatomical grounds, Ernst contributed evidence from a pathological stand- 

 point, and Cohnheim apparently succeeded in directly observing this 

 phenomenon in his experiments on dogs. Scheunert, on the other hand, 

 takes the opposite view and claims, from his experiments on the horse's 





wiSf 



Fig. 8. Curves showing comparative stimulatory power of water and oatmeal in the 

 human stomach. (Fowler, Rehfuss and Hawk; unpublished data.) 



stomach, that liquid in the distended stomach has a tendency to permeate 

 along the gastric walls. 



The effect of water combined with foodstuffs has also been the subject 

 of interesting experiments. Grobbels is authority for the statement that 

 in dogs the digestion of bread followed by water is shorter than that of 

 bread alone. Gabrilowiteh demonstrated that in the administration of a 

 mixture of meat and water the water passes out of the. stomach, allowing 

 the meat to follow its customary digestion. Certain experiments in the 

 writer's laboratory also furnish evidence that water, at least in sonic 

 cases, leaves the stomach very quickly. In this connection please refer 

 to Fig. 1, p. 282. In this experiment, a normal man received 500 c.c. 

 of water six hours after the last meal. Twenty minutes after the water 

 passed into the stomach, the gastric contents showed an acid value of 111.5, 

 and these figures were not subsequently materially altered. We believe 

 that the data from this tost furnish evidence of the rapidity with which 



