On poisons formed from food, and their relation to biliousness and diarrhoea / by T. Lauder Brunton.

  • Brunton, Thomas Lauder, Sir, 1844-1916.
Date:
[1885]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On poisons formed from food, and their relation to biliousness and diarrhoea / by T. Lauder Brunton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    although the poisoning is due to the ignorance or carelessness which allows sewage to enter the wells, and not to the direct introduction of poison by design. Similarly popular belief in regard to headaches is, I think, not entirely mistaken in giving to them the term “ bilious,” for while they may originate in the central nervous system, the liver may play a not unimportant part in their actual production. In the case of a lady who consulted me a short time ago, I was a good deal struck by her observation, that she was always better after the vomiting although she brought up no bile whatever, and she was puzzled to know how the mere action of vomiting could do good. Her observation to a certain extent corresponds with my own expe- rience, and I am inclined to believe that the relief experienced after the vomiting may be due, in part at least, to the emptying of the gall-ducts by the compression which the liver undergoes between the diaphragm and the abdominal walls in the act of emesis. The pressure under which bile is secreted is normally very low, and it is easy to see that if the bile should from any reason be more viscid than usual, mechanical pressure would be exceedingly useful, by tending to press the viscid bile, along with any alkaloid it may contain, out of the liver into the duodenum, and thus to pi'event its re-absorption. I do not mean to accuse the bile of being the primary factor in the production of biliary headache. I should be inclined to look upon it more as an accessory, and to attribute the symptoms rather to the presence in the bile of some alkaloidal substance which, on passing into the general circulation, gives rise to vascular disturbance and headache. We must look to further observations upon the nature of the - alkaloids formed by putrefaction; upon the effect of tj^phoid and other bacilli, on milk, eggs, beef-tea, and other foods used in typhoid fever, to a more exact investigation of the alkaloids formed in the intestine and found in the faeces and urine, and to experiment upon the action of aromatic substances formed in the intestine upon the liver, for further knowledge which may aid us in treating disease; but enough has been already done to show what important effects on the animal body are in all pro- bability produced by the alkaloidal products of albuminous decomposition.