Liver Autolysis in Vivo.

Abstract

The experimental work of Mason 1 called our attention to the extremely toxic reaction produced by the implantation of liver into the abdominal cavity of animals. Ellis and Dragstedt 2 showed that death of these animals was not strictly due to toxemia but there was a constant finding of large numbers of organisms of the B. welchii group in the abdominal cavity and drew attention to the fact that this B. welchii organism was a normal inhabitant of the livers of dogs. They implanted fetal liver into the abdomens of dogs and also adult livers which had been previously autoclaved and found that no toxic reaction ensued. Our experiments were undertaken with a view to establishing the mechanism of death in peritonitis due to liver autolysis. It was found earlier in the course of these experiments that if the liver was ground and allowed to autolyse and then sterilized that its implantation into the abdomen caused the same picture of an overwhelming B. welchii peritonitis as when the infected liver had been used. The seeming contradiction in the work of Ellis and Dragstedt is probably due to the fact that in their experiments the hard cooked mass of liver had less exposed surface and did not undergo autolysis so promptly. There is, therefore, some mechanism at work by which the ordinary flora of the intestine as represented by the Welch bacilli are allowed to make their way through the intestinal wall and infect these masses of autolysed liver which are shown to have been previously sterile by culture.

The following attempts were made to isolate the toxic factor in this reaction. 100 gm. specimens of liver were ground and incubated for 24 hours and then extracted with large amounts of water.