THE LIVER AS A DESTINATION AND DESTROYER OF POISONS.
The liver in the mature animal, being the one destination of the blood carried in the portal vein, necessarily becomes the recipient of all medicinal and poisonous agents absorbed by the capillaries and venous radicals of the stomach and intestines. This organ retains and lays up for a time the heavier metals, such as the salts of copper and iron, the iodides and bromides, the vegetable alkaloids such as nicotine, quinine, morphia, and curare, the toxic elements of the bile, the ptomaines and toxins produced by gastric and intestinal fermentations, indol, phenol, etc. Some agents it transforms, as peptones (which it renders non-poisonous), casein, the carbonate of ammonia and its salts with vegetable acids, also indol and phenol, which it combines with sulphuric acid as indyxol and phenyl sulphate, thus rendering them much less toxic. The destructions or new combinations established in the cases of the ptomaines and toxins may explain why such agents are usually much less poisonous when taken by the stomach than when generated in tissues or blood, or when injected hypodermically. Another interesting fact in connection with the ingestion of these bacteridian products (ptomaines and albumoses) is that, when the liver functions are normal as evidenced by the production of glycogen, the toxins are largely destroyed, and they fail to produce poisoning, whereas with a functionally deranged liver and no production of glycogen, they retain their potency, almost as if injected subcutem.