Volume 1

Indigestion, biliousness, and gout in its protean aspects / by J. Milner Fothergill.

Date:
1881-1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Indigestion, biliousness, and gout in its protean aspects / by J. Milner Fothergill. 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.

    24/344 (page 12)
    teeth supplemented. Disintegration is largely performed for us. Then by cooking, the starch granule is prepared Ts^ the action of the digestive ferment, by having its cap- sule ruptured. When bread, a biscuit, or pastry is chewed, the saliva is mixed with the farinaceous particles, and the transformation of starch mto grape-sugar is instituted. The insoluble starch is liquefied by hydration, that is by the addition of a molecule of water, into dextrine and grape-sugar. The formulee for these are : Dextrine Hio O3 Grape-sugar Cg Hja Og. Food could not be stored in a soluble form ; it would be washed away. So the digestive act is the dissolving of food, till, in fluid form, it can pass through the walls of the diges- tive canal into the blood. There it is turned back, de- hydrated by the removal of the added molecule of water, and stored up in the body. When the digested starch in the form of dextrine, the soluble or grape-sugar, is taken into the blood of the portal vein, and reaches the hver, it is dehydrated back into glycogen or animal starch. As rapidly as the starch is hquefied into soluble sugar it passes through the walls of the stomach; and so does not interfere with the digestion of albuminoids going on there- in. This diastatic action can only go on in an alkaline or neutral medium ; as soon as the contents of the stomach become acid the diastatic digestion of starch is arrested. Wlaat starch is left over from the salivary digestion, re- mains unaffected by the gastric digestion. When the food passes the pyloric ring, and is mixed with the alkaline bile,