The clinical examination of the urine in relation to disease / by C. Black.

  • Black, C.
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The clinical examination of the urine in relation to disease / by C. Black. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    10/60 (page 6)
    function of the organ is at last almost, and sometimes entirely, arrested, and death from the retention in the blood of the organic constituents of the urine occurs. If, on the one hand, we look at the chemical constitution of the urine—and if, on the other hand, we regard the chemistry of the tissues of the body—we can readily understand that, in the breaking up and dissolution of the latter in their withdrawal from the body, their ultimate elements are so re- arranged and re-combined as to appear in the derivative compounds and salts which are found in the urine. The conclusion, then, to which this doctrine leads, regards the urine as the representative of all the dead and dissolved tissues of the body. As the blood is the great vital stream which, in its onward course through all the ultimate ramifications of the body, supplies the pabulum from which every tissue is nourished, so the urine is the great menstruum by which those tissues are, when the vital principle has once quitted their living atoms, conveyed from the body. The one fluid, then, predicates a formative object—the other, a conservative end. Both are neces- sarily complex in their chemical constitution; both have certain constituents in common ; and, where they differ, they differ in those principles which, in the one fluid, have a prospective tendency to organisation ; in the other, to the retrospect of transformation, death, and decay. According to the present state of our knowledge the following represents the constitution of the urine in health: — TABLE OF THE NORMAL CONSTITUENTS OF THE URINE. Organic Constituents— Urea Creatinine Xanthine Inorganic Salts— Soda Potash Ammonia Magnesia Lime Iron Organic Acids— Uric acid Hippuric acid Phenylie acid Taurylic acid Inorganic Acids— Sulphuric acid Hydrochloric acid Phosphoric acid Silicic acid Damaluric acid Damolic acid Urinary Pigments— Uroha3matine Uroxan thine Uroerythrine