INTRODUCTION 27
should
treat these symptoms as they would the vomiting of pregnancy. I then found that
for this and for the convulsive illness sometimes happening in pregnancy, and
known as “eclampsia,” there was no rational treatment extant in medicine. So
once again a new problem had to be solved embryologically. It was, What induced
these bad symptoms in pregnancy, leading up to eclampsia, and in cancer ending
with the continued injection of trypsin, in something identical with eclampsia?
With continued improvements in the treatment, especially in the preparation of
the injections, when put up scientifically, these bad symptoms do not now
arise to anything like the extent that they did in 1906, for example. They
were, in an ascending series, nausea, vomiting, pain in the back, “sleeping in
any position,” drowsiness, mental and physical torpor, high arterial tension,
and albuminuria, culminating on occasion in convulsions, lasting several hours,
with complete unconsciousness (coma). Only one case of the latter (mentioned
farther on) was ever reported to me. It happened that there was an extensive
experimental study of eclampsia in one of the German medical journals for 1905
by Professor Zweifel, as well as the report of a lecture by him in the Munich Medizinische
Wochenschrift (February 13, 1906). He concluded that eclampsia was due to
sarcolactic acid in the foetal blood and placenta, but the conclusions appeared
to rest upon thin ice, and there may well have been other substances. Professor
Zweifel’s name awakened recollections of a former discovery of his, to the
effect that amylopsin was not produced in the human pancreas gland until some
months after birth. I had never before had occasion to consider the import of
this fact embryologically, although I had worked over the whole course of
gestation, studied its span, the cause of birth, the