A treatise on the blood, inflammation, and gun-shot wounds / by John Hunter ; with notes by James F. Palmer.

  • John Hunter
Date:
1840
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on the blood, inflammation, and gun-shot wounds / by John Hunter ; with notes by James F. Palmer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

    92/618
    full, and shook the blood, which mixed with the air in this motion, and it became immediately of a florid red.* As the globules are the coarsest part of the blood, and they appear to be fully affected by the air in the lungs, we may suppose that the vessels of that viscus do not run into extreme minuteness, by which, apparently, no other purpose would be answered. The blood of the menses, when it comes down to the mouth of the vagina, is as dark as venal blood ; and as it does not coagulate, it has exactly the appearance of the blood in those where the blood continues fluid. Whether this arises from its being venal blood, or from its acquiring that colour after extravasation, by its slow motion, it is not easily determined; but upon being exposed it becomes florid ; it is naturally of a dark colour, but rather muddy, not having that transparency which pure blood has. Whether this arises from its mixing with the mucus of the vagina, or from the cessation of life in it, I will not pretend to say. The red globules, however, are not dissolved ; they retain their figure. Does air in the cellular membrane of an emphysematous person produce or continue the floridness of the blood or not?f The surface of the blood becoming of a scarlet-red, whether exposed immediately to the air, or when only covered by mem- branes, through which we may suppose its influence to pass, is a circumstance which leads us to suppose that it is the pure air which has this effect, and not simply an exposed surface.J To ascertain this, I made the following experiment: I took a phial, and fixed a stop-cock to its mouth, and then apply- ing an air-pump to the cock,exhausted the whole air: in this state, keeping it stopped, I immersed its mouth in fresh blood flowing from a vein, and then turning the cock, allowed the blood to be pressed up into the phial. When it was about half full I turned the cock back, and now shook the phial with the blood, but its colour did not alter as in the former experiments; and when I allowed the blood to stand in this vacuum, its exposed surface was not in the least changed.§ The vast number of cells into which the lungs are divided, the whole arterial and venal system ramifying on the surface of those cells, and of course the whole of the blood passing through them in every circulation, together with the loss of life upon the missing three or four breathings in the most perfect animals, show the great nicety that is required in preserving the due properties of the * These experiments I made in the summer 1755, when 1 was house-surgeon at St. George's Hospital, and Dr. Hunter taught them ever after at his lectures. f Vide Chester on Cases. Case first, the venal florid. St. George's, a man emphysematous; blood very dark. | I may here observe, that fixed air [carbonic acid gas], as also inflammable airs, have contrary effects. § [I have much pleasure in referring the reader to Faust and Mitchell's papers on Endosmose and Exosmose, and on the Penetrativeness of Fluids, in the Ameri- can Journal of the Medical Sciences, vol. vii., pp. 22, 36. See also note, p. 42, respecting the menses.]