Some Clinical Notes upon Urine-Testing and Results

Extract

This fragmentary paper is to suggest rather than to inform. It is a bedside analysis of the urine in 969 female patients consecutively admitted into Claybury Asylum, and the notes cover a period of several years. Although the facts are many, the deductions are few, and although possibly nothing new is related, yet these notes involve an extensive collection of common details, and there has been some labour undertaken to present them. The summary may, I venture to hope, serve as an incentive to others to contribute more detailed statistics upon an aspect of mental diseases which is at present much talked of and much written about, viz., the relation of insanity to auto-intoxication and its dependence upon changed metabolism, particularly in an alteration through this changed metabolism of the normal functions of the kidneys, and I propose to run somewhat rapidly through the following headings. And first as to—