Page:Defensive Ferments of the Animal Organism (3rd edition).djvu/167

 athyreosis, as was once supposed, but with a dysthyreosis.

The symptoms in Basedow's disease are of particular interest. Here we find decomposition of the thymus gland, of the thyroid gland, and very often of the ovary, as has been established by Lampe, Papazolu, and Fuchs, on the basis of a large amount of material. No other organ was decomposed. It is interesting to note, that normal thyroid gland was decomposed only in very exceptional cases, while Basedow thyroids were always attacked.

This observation points to two possibilities in regard to the production of substances out of harmony with the plasma. Sometimes the normally constructed cell is incapable of completing the otherwise normal decomposition of particular substances, so that materials appear in the blood which still show the characteristic features of the cell, from which they originated. The decomposition is discontinued at a particular stage. A certain analogy with this kind of disturbance of cellular metabolism is presented by those anomalous cases, in which simpler products are not fully reduced. We may refer to cystinuria, alkaptonuria, pentosuria, &c. In the first case cystin, in alkaptonuria, homogentisic acid, and in the last case a pentose, are excreted in the urine. Some forms of glycosuria also belong here. The cells are unable to attack the grape sugar, because no active