DISTRIBUTION AND EXCRETION OF WATER AND CHLORIDES AFTER MASSIVE SALINE INFUSIONS

Massive intravenous infusion has become an accepted therapeutic measure of wide application among practitioners of medicine and surgery, and present trends in medical practice seem to indicate even more extensive use of the method in the future. Nevertheless, comparatively little is definitely known about the physiologic responses of the body to the direct artificial addition of solutions of inorganic substances to the circulation. This is because the procedure has developed primarily at the bedside rather than in the experimental laboratory. Moreover, as ordinarily practiced, it has proved almost completely devoid of danger to life. Because of the simplicity of the common vehicles of infusion—watery solutions of sodium chloride and dextrose usually—the consideration of intermediate metabolism has not seemed to most practitioners a serious issue, and the attention of experimentalists has turned, rather, to such matters as the causation and prophylaxis of the postinfusion reaction. It is true that attention has