Читать книгу Old Age Deferred. The causes of old age and its postponement by hygienic and therapeutic measures онлайн

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The antitoxic properties of the thyroid against different products is also shown by the observations of Lanz^[53] and Walter Edmunds,^[54] who have found that animals without thyroid resist narcosis badly; and, as we have shown in a communication to the Paris Biological Society,^[55] chloroform, like alcohol, produces a condition of hyperactivity in the thyroid gland, which results also in an excited mental condition. The observation that cases of Graves’s disease and of severe diabetes cannot stand narcosis may be related to this fact.

It has been shown recently by Hunt^[56] that the thyroid protects us against poisons like acetonitril, and that iodine acts through the thyroid. Garnier,^[57] of Paris, has found that certain chemical products, such as iodine, produce great alterations in the thyroid. As is well known, cases of Graves’s disease (hyperthyroidia) have been observed after iodine treatment. That the thyroid fulfils a protective rôle against infectious diseases may already be considered proved by the fact that, as Roger and Garnier,^[58] Crispin,^[59] Torre,^[60] Bayon,^[61] of Würzburg; de Quervain, and others have found, the thyroid is, as a rule, altered in infectious diseases. As Roger and Garnier have shown by a series of investigations confirmed by the above-named authors, the thyroid shows in acute infectious diseases with fever an increased activity with enlargement of the follicles, which are filled with a large quantity of colloid substance which may even enter into the adjacent lymphatic spaces. However, this hyperactivity of the thyroid gland may be followed by its exhaustion, and thus after a certain duration of high fever there may be no colloid substance at all in the folliculi.