An Experimental and Critical Study of the Etiology of Chronic Nephritis.

It is only when the full etiology of disease is known that the medicine of our day can become the medicine of the future=m- to say, hygiene in its widest sense."=m-. CONTENTS.Introduction=m-=m- material=m- of alcohol, ether, chloroform and amyl nitrite inhalations=m- effect of injury of the kidney by the hypodermic needle, and of normal saline solution, adrenalin and alcohol solutions injected directly into the renal parenchyma=m- effect of adrenalin and gelatin solutions injected directly into the veins=m- of experimental results=m- the etiology of chronic nephritis=m-=m-. INTRODUCTION.With the knowledge that the combined death rates from heart and kidney diseases have almost doubled within the past twenty-five years in the cities of Boston, New York and Chicago,1 there has been offered no sufficient explanation for the cause of this increase, or of the widespread occurrence of nephritis, and no means of prevention are proposed offer- ing any hope that the increase will be checked in the future.Without knowledge of the cause of disease, little of permanent value has ever been done toward its prevention, if one might except the discovery of vaccination for the prevention of smallpox.While a variety of substances have been used successfully to cause diseased conditions in the kidneys of animals, such as mineral or veg- etable poisons or irritants, the toxins of pathogenic bacteria, and nephrotoxins, at present the lesions reported and the conditions created can not be claimed to resemble essentially the lesions of chronic productive nephritis in man, which are found so frequently at autopsy that a normal kidney is a rare exception in an adult.Recognizing that the accepted etiologic factors mentioned and copied from author to author, from the time of Richard Bright, account for many of the frankly-marked cases which can be followed in an almost unbroken chain of clinical and pathologic evidence from the inception