On a new constituent of the blood and its physiological import / by L.C. Wooldridge ; communicated by M. Foster.

  • Wooldridge, Leonard Charles, 1857-1889.
Date:
1885
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On a new constituent of the blood and its physiological import / by L.C. Wooldridge ; communicated by M. Foster. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    1885.J It is necessary for these experiments that the peptonisation should be complete. For the complete understanding of these results, I must return to a further consideration of this new constituent of the plasma. The turbidity which appears on first cooling the plasma, if examined microscopically, is found to consist of a great number of minute pale transparent bodies of a rounded shape, much resembling small organised bodies, such for instance as the stroma of the red corpuscles, except that they are of very various size, but generally much smaller than red corpuscles. They have a great tendency to run together into granular masses. At first the precipitate is soluble on re-warming the plasma slightly, but it soon undergoes change, and loses the power of redissolving by heat. If the substance be collected by means of the centrifuge it forms a disk or thin membrane at the bottom of the tube, much reminding one of fibrin, but closer examination shows that it presents marked differences from the latter, and that, in truth, it much more closely resembles the peculiar viscid body obtained by destroying leucocytes with dilute alkalies, &c. On longer standing, however, it becomes in most cases still further changed, and is then undistinguishable from ordinary fibrin, swelling in dilute HCl like the latter. For further details as to the properties of this substance, I refer to my paper quoted above. We have already seen that this substance gives rise to fibrin fer- ment, but it does more than this in inducing coagulation. Pepton plasma is not coagulable with fibrin ferment. If we take some plasma rich in this new substance, and by means of COg induce coagulation, we obtain, on removing the clot, a serum which has the power of inducing exceedingly rapid coagulation in a new portion of plasma, and this, when the serum has regained its alkalinity. This serum contains ferment, but inasmuch as ferment is not sufficient to induce coagulation, it must also contain some other substance. Now leucocytes have exactly the same power. They give rise to ferment, but they also give rise to the other substance necessary for coagulation. We see, therefore, that we have dissolved in the plasma a body exerting the same influence on the induction of coagulation as the leucocytes. I think this is the strongest chemical proof that can be brought that the leucocytes break down to make, at any rate, a part of the proteid constituents of the plasma, and have shown above the influ- ence which diet, &c., has on the extent of this process, a fact of obvious interest for the question of assimilation. There is, however, another important conclusion to be drawn from these observations, viz., that one must admit, in addition to the
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