quality of the fluid secreted by the stomach vary much in different circumstances,—that, when its villous coat is not subjected to some stimulus, the fluid which lines it is not acid, and does not possess any particular solvent action,—but that when the membrane is stimulated by the presence of food or other sources of excitement, the quality of the secretion is materially changed, for it becomes strongly acid and is capable of dissolving alimentary substances both in and out of the body. And still more lately the solvent power of the proper gastric juice over the stomach, and its capability of producing perforation in animals after death, have been established in the most satisfactory manner by Dr. Carswell,[1] who has shown by a series of incontrovertible facts,—that in the rabbit when killed during the digestion of a meal, and left for some hours afterwards in particular positions, all the phenomena of spontaneous gelatinized perforations observed at times in man, may be easily produced at will,—that acidity of the gastric juice is an invariable circumstance when such perforations are remarked,—and that the appearances in question as they occur in the rabbit are the result of chemical action alone, and occur only after death. Thus, then, the physiological experiments of Tiedemann and Gmelin, together with the investigations of Carswell, not merely establish positively the fact, that the stomach may be perforated after death by the gastric juice, but likewise account clearly for the negative results obtained by other experimentalists. For example, passing over earlier experiments, they explain sufficiently the negative results obtained by Dr. Pommer of Heilbronn,[2] an experimentalist of some reputation in Germany; for, falling into the error of some of the less recent experimentalists on this subject, he made his observations on animals killed slowly by starving,—in which circumstance there is no proper gastric juice in the stomach, and consequently no solvent action can exist.
These statements relative to the causes and phenomena of gelatinized perforation in the stomach supply the strongest possible presumption which analogy can furnish, that a great proportion of spontaneous gelatinized perforations in the human subject are owing to the action of the gastric juice after death. And this presumption is increased to something not far removed from demonstration by the circumstance, that in man the process of softening has actually been traced extending in the dead body. This interesting fact was first noticed by Mr. Allan Burns.[3] In the body of a girl who died of diseased mesenteric glands he found an aperture in the fore part of the stomach with the usual pulpy margin, and the liver in contact with the hole uninjured. In two days more the liver opposite the hole had become pulpy, and its peritonæal coat quite dissolved; and the back part of the stomach opposite the hole was also dissolved, so that only its peritonæal coat remained. Dr. Sharpey has communicated to me a similar observation. On finding in the body of a child the stomach
