The orange people.
THE human race comes in various colors: white, yellow, brown, black, and all graduations in between. The American aborigines are described as Red Men and physicians are accustomed to seeing people gray with shock or blue with cyanosis. Yet to see a human as orange as an orange is so startling as to deserve comment—and to see two such cases merits reporting them, especially since no previous emphasis on such bizarre discoloration of patients can be found in medical literature. The parents of orange are the primary colors yellow and red, a fact as old as the history of pigments. Certain foodstuffs have a high content of the yellow pigment carotene, such as carrots and squash; and certain others have a high content of the red pigment lycopene, notably tomatoes and beets. Yellowish discoloration of the skin and other body tissues with carotene is referred to as carotenemia, a not
Can carrots be addictive? An extraordinary form of drug dependence.
The paper describes three cases of dependence on carotenoids with typical symptoms of irritability and nervousness accompanying their abstinence, with a long-term dependence, and an inability to simply discontinue. Three patients (a man and two women) all being smokers, evaluated this dependence as very similar to that on tobacco. The limitation of further use had the same effect in both cases. The women evaluate the dependence as stronger than that on cigarettes, the man as somewhat weaker. The former patient--a woman--even relapsed, and recently found herself in danger of further relapse. This, however, she nipped in the bud. Laboratory enzyme examinations revealed a disorder in the enzymatic outfit affecting the auto-immunity and the neurovegetative system.
THE COLORIMETRIC ESTIMATION OF CHOLESTEROL IN BLOOD, WITH A NOTE ON THE ESTIMATION OF COPROSTEROL IN FECES
During the past 6 years a number of different procedures have been utilized in the extraction of cholesterol from small quantities of blood for its ultimate calorimetric estimation. From the multiplicity of methods employed for the extraction process one would infer that they were not entirely satisfactory. Since1913 a number of these methods have been tried out in our laboratory. In connection with a study of the blood lipoids in obesity, carried out in collaboration with Dr. Kast, it seemed necessary to investigate further the question of a suitable cholesterol method. For some time now, however, we have employed a comparatively simple and very satisfactory method,’ which is described in the present paper. Grigaut2 was apparently the first to attempt the calorimetric estimation of cholesterol, using the Liebermann-Burchard reaction. 2 years later, Weston3 made use of the Salkowski reaction for a similar purpose. Since these reactions are very delicate they at once afforded a means of estimating the cholesterol in small amounts of blood, thus furnishing an impetus to this type of