Proceedings of the Connecticut State Medical Society (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Use of Sodium Citrate in Infant Feeding H. Merriman Steele, M.D., New Haven, Conn. In 1893 Dr. E. A. Wright of London, England, wrote a short note published in the Lancet advocating the addition of sodium citrate to milk in the feeding of infants and invalids. He was led to this suggestion through the work of Arthurs and Pages, who had found that cow's milk when treated with oxalates and fluorides did not clot with rennet because the lime salts of the milk had been precipitated by their addition. " If, on the contrary," to quote Dr. Poynton, " instead of adding these salts lime salts were added to the milk the clot that formed with rennet was denser than usual. Dr. Wright applied this principle to the question of infant feeding and pointed out there are two forms of milk curdling: The first with rennet in which the clot is firm; the other with acid in which the cloth is loose. The first is the clot that forms when the stomach is empty. He believed that much of the milk dyspepsia of infants was clue to the indigestibility of the rennet curd of cow's milk, for it is rennet curd that is formed when milk is taken on an empty stomach. If then, as Arthurs and Pages o'hserved, some of the lime salts in cow's milk are precipitated the clotting by the rennet will be delayed in time and be less firm in its consistency and thus become more digestible. Further, cow's milk can afford this precipitation of some of the lime salts because they are present in it in greater excess as compared with human milk. The oxalates and fluorides being poisonous salts Dr. Wright suggested the use of sodium citrate as the reagent, it having the same power and being harmless to the body. This idea of Dr. Wright, so far as I am able to find, passed untried for eleven years when, August 13, 1904, Dr...