The behaviour of Saccharine Matter in the Blood

THE disappearance of sugar from blood being a subject of great interest to the physician as well as to the physiologist, I deemed it advisable to make some investigations as to its cause, while I was working at diabetes due to extirpation of the pancreas1. In this article I propose giving the results obtained from blood after its removal from the living animal, reserving for a future occasion the consideration of the behaviour of sugar in the circulation of the living animal. Normal blood, as is known, contains fromn 005 to 015 per cent. of sugar; there being less in venous than in arterial blood. Schenk2 having recently stated that the whole amount, of the sugar in the blood cannot be correctly determined by any single one of our present methods of analysis, this conclusion having been arrived at from the results he obtained from a series of experiments made, not only with blood itself, but serum, and soluitions of the albumens of the blood, it may be well for me to mention that his experiments were performed as follows: After ascertaining by a quantitative analysis how much sugar a measured amount of defibrinated calf's blood contained, he added to it a definite quantity of grape-sugar, stirred it, and after waiting for a period of five minutes, acidulated the mixture with acetic acid, added from 4 to 5 vols. of water, and then boiled it, so as to coagulate the albumens. The coagulum was thrown upon a filter and thoroughly washed. The filtrate and wash-water evaporated to a convenient quantity, thereby coagulating the remaining traces of albumen; which were then separated by fresh filtrationi, and washed. The sugar was now estimated according to Knapp's method of titration. As a result