When the uric acid amateur chemist comes to study the real poisons of the blood, he will be confronted with a problem even more intricate than uric acid, though that one is intricate enough and still unsolved. For there are "poisons in the blood," though it is improbable that uric acid is one of them. These poisons are the blood-proteins, so many that the physiologist has never counted them, so minute in quantity that no chemist has ever isolated them, so complex in structure that the ablest chemists of the world stand appalled before a molecule that contains sixty atoms of carbon,[1] so powerful that an undetermined fraction smaller than one-third of a grain will kill ten thousand guinea pigs or one hundred thousand mice, and so perfectly under control that they circulate harmlessly in the normal blood. The marvel is that any animal remains alive; and no animal would remain alive were it not for a system of protection by which these poisons are rendered harmless, usually by a slight rearrangement of the atoms in their molecule which is one of the wonders of organic chemistry.
We are far from knowing just what happens when we pour acids and alkalies and foods into this witches' cauldron of blood. Rather than impudently announcing the changes that are about to take place in the blood when we administer a certain food or medicine, we should stand in reverent awe before one of the most intricate and marvelous puzzles with which nature ever challenged the chemist and the physiologist.
Shall we therefore stop using acids and alkalies as medicines because we do not know each step in their mode of action? By no means. We do not know each step in the mode of action of any medicine or of our foods, either, for that matter; but we do not for that reason stop eating. We should still use the acids and alkalies for their effect on the patient as far as we can see it just as we shall still go on eating food because it nourishes us; but we shall be wise to stop talking so glibly about what we cannot see and do not yet know, the effect of those acids and alkalies on the chemistry of the blood.
Uricacidæmia and Gout. Now, why do I speak with respect of de Mussy's theory of gout as a cause of hay fever and so disrespectfully of the uric acid doctrine? Are not gout and uric acid poisoning the same thing? No. They are not; though the two ideas are usually confused by medical men since Garrod's time and his demonstration of the increase and decrease of uric acid in the blood of gouty patients. Gout is something more than a simple accumulation of uric acid in the blood because of its imperfect elimination by the kidneys. What that something is, we do not know; but gout is, at least, a clinical entity, a definite group of symptoms known since Hippocrates' time. Take away the uric acid theory and you still have the disease, gout, that any of us can recognize, as the Greeks and Romans recognized it when the word uric acid was unknown. It is on these symptoms of gout, the clinical picture of disease, not on any hypothetical uric acid, that de Mussy based his theory and thus far he is on solid ground. On the other hand, uric acid poisoning is largely a figment of the imagination. Take away the uric acid, which has never been satisfactorily proved to be there, and there is nothing left. In not one one-hundredth part of the cases of so-called uric acid poisoning is it proved that uric acid has anything to do with the case.
The Deposits of Uric Acid in Gout. The deposit of uric acid in the form of urates in the gouty joint has always been a strong argument for the theory that gout, at least, is due to an excess of uric acid (urates) in the blood. At one time, in a humble way, I was a pathologist, and this theory of a blood overloaded with uric acid as the only thinkable cause of its deposition in the joints never impressed me as pathologically sound. I often compared these deposits of urates in the joints with the deposits of lime salts so often found at autopsies in caseous glands or small necrotic areas. The superficial observer says:
"See what an excess of lime salts there must have been in the blood." He is thinking of laboratory glassware and the ground around a mineral spring that becomes encrusted with salts as the solutions evaporate. But, in animal pathology, this is a false conclusion. The animal body is not a test-tube and, in it, the laws of physics are modified by those of physiology. Lime salts are deposited in the caseous gland or tubercle not because they are in excess in the blood but because lime salts are attracted to all caseous material from normal blood. Whether or not this calcification is an intentional provision of nature to protect the body, to petrify the necrotic material and make it harmless, is not the question here, though the calcification has this effect. The point here is that calcification of caseous glands or necrotic areas does not presuppose an excess of lime salts in the blood. The first step is not an excess of lime in the blood but a necrosis, after which the lime salts will be deposited from normal blood.
So, it has seemed to me that the deposit of urates in and around a joint is no proof of their excess in the blood. Just as in calcification, so in gout, the first step may be a minute area of necrosis or other local degeneration that attracts the urates that are always present in normal blood; or the secret of the gouty inflammation, like that of urticaria and hay fever, may at last be found in Anaphylaxis, as described in the next chapter.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Wenn mehr als 60 Atome Kohlenstoff im Molekül sind, dann ueberlasse ich das Object zu andern. Bunge, page 262, quoting "einen hervorragenden Forscher auf dem Gebiete der organischen Chemie." See Bunge for authority of these statements.