“On the influence of thyroid feeding and of various foods and of small amounts of food upon poisoning by aceto-nitril”

One of the current theories of the functions of the thyroids is that these organs neutralize certain poisons occurring in the body; these poisons are purely hypothetical, and, so far as the author is aware, no one has yet reported experiments in which it has been shown that the thyroid can render a poison harmless. In the present experiments it was found that mice, to which thyroid had been fed for a few days, were markedly resistant to acetonitril; such mice recovered from the effects of ten to eleven times the ordinarily fatal dose of acetonitril. No such increased resistance to hydrocyanic acid or nitroprussiate of soda was caused by the thyroid feeding. Thyroidectin had an effect opposite to that of the thyroid, i. e., it increased the susceptibility of mice to acetonitril, but this effect was not greater than that of dry normal blood and was less than that of peptone. Feeding with parathyroids had an effect opposite to that of thyroid, i. e., it caused the mice to become more susceptible to acetonitril; the effect, however, was much less marked than that of the thyroid. Potassium iodid increased the resistance of mice to acetonitril, but the extent of this action was not at all comparable with that of thyroid.

In other experiments it was found that a protein diet (ham and cheese) caused an increased susceptibility of mice to acetonitril; a carbohydrate diet (rice and dextrose) increased the resistance to this poison. As a rule it required about four times as large a dose to kill the animals that were fed on a carbohydrate diet as it did to kill those fed on a protein diet. Animals kept on a very limited diet also showed a marked resistance to acetonitril; in most of such experiments it required about three times as much acetonitril to kill as was necessary to accomplish the same result on animals which had been kept on a normal diet.