Abstract
Working on the decerebrated cats, Vincent and Thompson were able to note the stepping up of the arterial blood pressure on giving intravenously chloralose solution, saturated at 40°. That is, the drug acts to elevate the blood pressure for a considerable time, and they never wrote of a depressoric action of the drug. Such outcome infers, there-fore, that chloralose augments epinephrine production and discharge, but such a view is in total disagreement with the experiments of Tourna de and Hermann and of Sato and Ohmi. What is more, the latter observers were unable to find any definiteelevation of the mean arterial blood pressure in the dog.
In the present investigations the cats were decerebrated under ether narcosis or their spinal cord was cut under the medulla oblongata, and after taking off the ether, chloralose, saturated at 40°, was injected in-travenously in repeated doses of 10 c. c. for each injection.
The mean blood pressure fell soon on injection in every case, and some minutes were needed for a complete recovery. In some cases, the height attained in the recovery period exceeded that in the pre-injection period: This occurred usually in the first injections, which shows the pressure was disproportionately low in comparison to the animal conditions, at that time. And this action of elevating the blood pressure after introducing chloralose solution is not peculiar to that drug, since quite the same effect was also obtained by the normal saline solution.
Briefly, we were not able to see any elevating action of chloralose, intravenously introduced, upon the mean blood pressure in the decere-brated cats and the spinal cats, contrary to a previous communication.
