Diabetes, mellitus and insipidus / by Andrew H. Smith.

  • Smith Andrew H. (Andrew Heermance), 1837-1910.
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Diabetes, mellitus and insipidus / by Andrew H. Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    Boils and Carbuncles are of frequent occurrence in diabetics, and especially in elderly people. The presence of a carbuncle should always suggest the examination of the urine for sugar, even if no other indication of diabetes is apparent. Gangrene resembling the senile form in its ap- pearance and progress, is an occasional though rare .complication. It most frequently attacks the toes, but may appear upon any part of the body in which the circulation is inactive. Changes in the Eye. —Mitchell, pointed out many years ago, that injecting a solution of sugar be- neath the skin of a frog would produce in the course of twenty-four hours an opacity of the crys- . talline lens, which would promptly disappear when the animal was restored to the normal medium. These experiments threw m«ch light upon the fact already known that diabetics were especially liable to cataract. This is indeed the change most frequently observed in the eye. It occurs in about three or four per cent, of the cases of diabetes. Richardson subsequently found that arti- ficial cataract could be produced by a variety of saline solutions, as well as by the sugar used in Mitchell’s experiments. The only essential condition was that the density of the solution should be greater than that of the blood. The fluids of the lens are withdrawn by osmosis, passing into the denser con- tiguous humors. A deposition of calcareous matter