Not infrequently during or after arsphenamine therapy, visible jaundice develops rather suddenly in certain patients and within from a few days to several weeks terminates in clinical recovery. Because of the benign course of this jaundice, material for gross and histologic examination is practically unavailable. Most discussions, therefore, dealing with the etiology and morbid anatomy of the condition have been characterized by inferences drawn from clinical observations rather than by conclusions founded on pathologic data.
We report the following two cases of nonfatal jaundice associated chronologically with arsphenamine therapy because in each instance we had the unusual opportunity of making adequate histologic studies of the liver. In case 1 the patient died from a bleeding peptic ulcer and ascending pyelonephritis four weeks after jaundice had disappeared from the skin and scleras. In case 2 material for biopsy of the liver was obtained during the height of icterus at laparotomy performed