50 
D. D. CUNNINGHAM. 
0)1 Certain Effects of Starvation on Vegetable and Animal 
Tissues.^ By D. D. Cunningham, M.B., Surgeon, Indian 
Medical Service; Bellow of the Calcutta University. 
That insufficient supply of nutritive material is closely con- 
nected with fatty degeneration of tissue is a well-ascertained 
pathological phenomenon. Rindlleisch, in his work on ^Patho- 
logical Histology,^ expresses himself as follows in regard to this 
subject: — ^^This (the exclusively pathological category of fatty 
metamorphosis) includes all cases of disproportion between the 
means of nutrition and the parenchyma to be nourished. Such 
a disproportion may be caused either by a diminution of the 
nutriens, or by an increase of the nutriendum. If a minute 
vessel in the brain is plugged, the circulation in the area which 
it supplies is not wholly suspended, owing to the manifold 
anastomoses with neighbouring vessels ; nevertheless, a very 
considerable retardation of the current takes place, which may 
even give rise to temporary stasis and to hsemorrhage, and this 
suffices to disturb nutrition, and so to cause fatty metamor- 
phosis.^^^ 
It is easy to find other concrete instances of fatty degeneration 
in association with impaired supply of nutritive material. The 
fatty degenerations of various tissues occurring in old age, in 
disused organs, and in tissues and ofgans where increase in bulk 
has been disproportionate to vascular supply, are currently cited 
as examples of it. 
While this is the case, however, it is by no means generally 
recognised that fatty degeneration of tissue is an accompani- 
ment of the general deprivation of nutritive supply incident on 
starvation. On the contrary, we find such a distinguished 
authority as Bauer writing as follows : — During a period of 
thirty days of starvation the body loses the greater part of its 
organic albumen (Organeiweiss) without the cells becoming 
incapable of performing their functions; they continue to act 
and are capable of full recovery on the addition of material, and 
death results when the actions produced by the decompositions 
are no longer sufficient to permit of vital phenomena. There is 
* This article forms a portion of a Report regarding the pathological 
changes observed by the author in persons who had died during the famine 
in the Madras Presidency in 1877. The complete paper appears as an 
Appendix to the recently published ‘ Fourteenth Annual Report of the 
Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India.’ — Editor ‘ Quart. 
Journ. Micro. Sc.’] 
2 ‘ Manual of Pathological Histology,’ by Dr. Eduard Riudfleisch 
(English translation), vol. i, p. 29. 
