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                                                       GENERAL DIRECTIONS                                               201

 

Dr. Cleaves first insisted, and Captain Lambelle has urged it too, during the treatment scientific blood-examinations are of very great importance. This again points to the treatment of cases in sanatoria.

The system of units of tryptic and amylolytic activity adopted by Sir W. Roberts, M.D., F.R.S., is an empirical one, but it possesses certain advantages over some of the methods employed in scientific laboratories for estimating, for example, tryptic activity. Unlike, for instance, the accurate scientific methods advocated by Dr. Emil Westergaard and Dr. Tetens Hald (Lancet, November t6, 1907, p. 1371 et seq.), it does not require a fully, equipped laboratory for its accomplishment, and often I have used it in my own house. With a little practice and after the careful study of Sir W. Roberts’ papers, any physician ought to be able to use these excellent methods for himself with very simple apparatus, which can be put together almost anywhere. The apparatus should include a racing stop-watch. It may be that in course of time some more severely scientific methods of estimating the activity of trypsin, and amylopsin too, may, with great advantage, be employed, such as, for example, the tryptic assay, advocated and discovered by Emil Abderhalden (Zeitschrift physiol. Chemie, 1907, vol. li.). In the meantime the writer is content to suggest, as at present sufficiently accurate and scientific for all practical purposes, the tryptic and amylolytic methods discovered by Sir William Roberts, and published by him in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, as well as in a special book.*

*  Roberts, William “On the Estimation of the Amylolytic and Proteolytic Activity of Pancreatic Extracts,” in Proc. Roy. Soc. London, 1881, vol. xxxii., pp. 145-161 and “Digestion and Diet,” London, 1891, Smith, Elder and Co.

The test for trypsin was named by Roberts “the meta-casein (cont. on p 202)

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