On the treatment of acute rheumatism by salicylate of soda.

  • Sharkey, Seymour John (Sir)
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the treatment of acute rheumatism by salicylate of soda. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    read before the St. Thomas’s Hospital Physical Society, reprinted in this volume. It has recently been asserted that sugar makes its appear- ance in the urine of persons taking salicylate of soda. To determine this the urine of several patients who had taken large quantities of the salicylate, and whose urine gave a very strong reaction with the perchloride of iron, was tested by boiling with Fehling’s solution. At first a precipitate came down, which appeared to be whitish; but on boiling for several minutes longer the whole mixture gradually changed to a reddish-brown colour. This, however, appeared to be due not to any change in the colour of the precipitate, but rather to a change in the fiuid. Mr. Theodore Acland then offered to determine whether the precipitate contained copper. The mix- ture was placed on a filter, and the filtrate came through as a strongly dichoic fluid, olive green by reflected and reddish brown by transmitted light. The precipitate well washed was perfectly white, and dissolved completely in two drops of hydrochloric acid. Ammonia was then added in excess without any colour at all appearing in the fluid, which remained like water, and was consequently free from copper. This showed that the urine had not reduced and precipitated the copper, as it does when it contains sugar. I then tried the fermentation test. Two test tubes were filled with urine from a case of rheumatic fever, which con- tained a large quantity of salicylate of soda. In one some German yeast was placed, and in the other none. They were both inverted over mercury, and placed on the ward stove for twenty-four hours. At the end of that time there was hardly any change in the contents of either. When some grape sugar was added to the urine, however, a large quantity of gas was produced by fermentation. It seems then pretty clear that if any sugar at all be present in the urine of these cases its quantity must be infinitesimal. The drug makes its appearance in the urine very soon after ingestion, but the exact time is not easy to determine, as it may have been excreted by the kidneys long before it is passed from the bladder. In ten cases in which I noted its first appearance, the earliest was one hour and forty minutes after ingestion, the latest eleven and a half hours. In ten cases in