The Histochemistry of the Adrenal Gland

Because the adrenal glands contain a higher concentration of vitamin C than most other parts of the body (1,2), they have been a focus of attention for those interested in the metabolism of the vitamin, and the pathological conditions resulting from its deficiency. At the present time, a number of attempts to establish the histological distribution of the vitamin in the adrenals have been made. Thus, Giroud and Leblond (3), Westergaard (4), Siehrs and Miller (5), and Bessey, Menten, and King (6), separately employed the silver nitrate staining reaction to indicate the distribution of vitamin C in the adrenal glands. However, as pointed out by Harris and Ray (7), and Gough and Zilva (S), this staining reaction is unreliable in some instances. Since the introduction of a direct chemical method for quantitative estimation of the vitamin C in microtome sections of tissue (9), it is possible to determine the distribution of this substance with much greater accuracy than the silver staining reaction permits. Accordingly, this method has been employed in the present investigation, so that the number and type of the cells in the adrenal gland can be correlated with the presence of the vitamin.