TECHNIQUE OF THE EXPERIMENTS

In several recent publications a study has been made of the relative toxicity of different anesthetics for the acutely ne-phropathic kidney (1, 2) and for animals with a naturally ac-quired chronic nephropathy (3, 4). When normal animals are anesthetized for experimental purposes and during anaesthesias in man, a temporary or permanent suspension of urine formation not infrequently occurs. The following study has been under-taken to ascertain the cause for the temporary or permanent arrest of urine formation, which occurs in normal animals during a surgical anaesthesia. The observations contained in this paper are based on a study of the effect of ether, chloroform and Gr#{233}hant’s anesthetic on the formation of urine in one hundred and thirty-one normal dogs that have been surgically anesthet-ized by these substances. Forty-three of these animals became temporarily or permanently anuric during the course of the ex-periments. Ninety-eight of the animals that furnish the basis for the study received at some period during the course of the experiment one or more diuretic solutions. Such animals, therefore, permit observations on the ability of such solutions to increase or reestablish the flow of urine. Of the forty-three normal animals that have become temporarily or permanently anuric, nine experiments have been selected as representative of the group and are included in table 1