Important work concerning the influence of certain drugs upon the basal metabolism in normal men has been carried out by Higgins and Means1 in Edsall's clinic at Boston. They present a summary of their findings in the following table:

The Influence Of Drugs On Metabolism

* Or none, when the bronchi are already constricted.

† This obviously does not apply to large doses of morpbin.

They report that caffein caused a rise in the metabolism equal to 15 per cent, without changing the pulse-rate. The increase after camphor was 8 per cent, and after atropin only 4 per cent, above the normal basal metabolism. That therapeutic doses of strychnin cause no increase in metabolism is significant.

1 Higgins and Means: "Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics," 1915, vii, 1.

Unpublished results of Means, Aub, and DuBois show that large doses of caffein given to normal individuals cause an increase in the basal metabolism of 10 to 30 per cent, without increasing the pulse-rate or the body temperature.

Other unpublished data from the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology, and taken from investigations by Eggleston and DuBois, show that no change in metabolism occurs in cardiac cases after the administration of full therapeutic doses of digitalis which markedly reduce the heart rate.

The influence of large doses of caffein appears at first thought to be remarkable, the basal heat production rising to the level found after the ingestion of large quantities of meat. The increase is slight, however, when compared with the stimulation of metabolism by muscular exercise. It appears great only when compared with the immutability of the level of the normal basal metabolism, a state in which the heat production is subservient to the requirement of energy on the part of the cells for the maintenance of life, the requirement being so regulated and adjusted that the heat loss per square meter of surface is approximately 40 calories per hour, while the body temperature is maintained at a constant level.