Word: sodium
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Horace used dropsy (most commonly, a swelling of the feet and ankles) as a figure of speech for greed. But modern medical science has found truth as well as poetry in his lines. The cause of the malady, doctors now believe, is not water, but sodium, which prompts the body to hoard water in abnormal amounts - usually as the result of a heart or kidney ailment...
...Institute), with whom he corresponded, Dr. Schemm was soon sure that he was on the right track. The nub of his idea was that dropsy victims were not waterlogged, but brine-logged. Edema fluid, said he, is no more fit for the body to use than sea water. Excess sodium in the body, usually in the form of its chloride (common salt), takes large amounts of water to keep it in solution. Often its demands are so great that a dropsy victim is simultaneously suffering from a shortage of water in other body functions-especially the kidneys, which are then...
...thing to do, Dr. Schemm decided, was to cut down the sodium taken in with food, to less than a gram a day (practicable only on a hospital diet). Thus, metabolic acids could take up the sodium already in the body, and give the kidneys enough water so that they could work properly and flush out the sodium salts through the urine-"using water as a medicine, which it is." By 1937 Dr. Schemm was telling Montana colleagues that his treatment was a success. "Restriction of water," he said, "is useless, harmful and a cause of suffering...
...Wine," said he, "contains and carries to the human organism ... a complex of mineral materials (calcium salts, potassium, iron, sodium and many more), of organic materials (alcohols, sugar, glycerine, organic acids, tannin, ether, alde-hydes), of vitamins, and diverse mineral substances. Because of these different things wine, for a healthy man who makes habitual use of it, excites the appetite, stimulates the motor and secretive functions . . . and helps the whole digestion ... It favors general nutrition and the stability of a man's humor...
...female hormone, estrone, in the urine increases greatly after conception. First, Dr. Richardson puts a specimen of urine in a special double-barreled test tube he invented. Then he gets rid of other hormones (progesterone derivatives), which might interfere with the test, by mixing in chloroform and sodium hydroxide. The fluid containing estrone rises to the top. This fluid is put in two other test tubes and a different chemical reagent added to each, for a double check. If the patient is pregnant, one reagent turns the solution dark brown; the other makes it reddish purple.* With both reagents...