634 
FRANK H. MILLER. 
I would refer to the wonderful and fruitful experiments of 
Minkowski, of Strassburg, Von Mering of Hedon, and others 
only a little less celebrated. Probably in no other direction in 
experimented pathology has more thorough and brilliant work 
been done than by Minkowski, and, with the outcome that 
while he is not at present in position to state the ultra occult 
change in metabolism, which is evidently accountable for the 
seeming inability for.' the tissues to take up and use the sugar 
normally arising from alimentation and manufactured from 
direct metabolism of the cells themselves, they point very con- 
clusiv elv when the primary cause for this occult change arises, 
and in no manner can I make him and his work more explicit 
than to quote his words : “ In dogs a diabetes mellitus of the 
gravest form followed without exception the total extirpation 
of the pancreas.” The cases so operated upon by this man with 
this result are among the hundreds, and everything he has 
written upon the subject has been subjected to the purgingfire 
of European criticism, but he has nobly met his adversaries, 
and with living proof. In the light of his experience he is led 
to regard this condition as one of the metabolisms brought 
about iu some at present not known manner of interference 
in and disbalanced relation of the pancreas as a gland 
in the complex phenomena of the animal body, and would 
define it as a functional pancreatic disease, marked by almost 
or entire inability of the tissues to assimilate the sugar or¬ 
dinarily provided for their nutrition, marked by glycaetnia 
and secretion of sugar in just that quantity by the kidneys 
as symptoms, and he advances two theories why this comes to 
pass. It is not that the pancreatic fluid or juice is an all essen¬ 
tial, or that disease of its substance may set up important 
changes in the nervous plexus in its region as has been main¬ 
tained by some, but rather would he give us these two theories 
to help him work out: ist. Either that the prime vital function 
of the pancreas is to take to itself and destroy or render innocu¬ 
ous a circulating not nearer known agent of the living blood, 
the constant action of which is to excite these phenomena of the 
