The laws of health / [David Nunes Nabarro].

  • Nabarro, David Nunes, 1874-
Date:
[1905?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The laws of health / [David Nunes Nabarro]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    so small they cannot be seen with the naked eye but only on examining the blood under a microscope. There are two kinds of blood-corpuscles, the red and the white, the red being far more numerous than the white. These blood cells float in a clear, colourless liquid which is like thin white of egg in its composition. 65. In the body of a healthy person the blood is always liquid. When any part of the body is pricked or cut, blood runs out just as water does from a burst pipe. Very soon after blood escapes from the body it congeals or clots. If you collected some blood in a glass vessel you would find that, after a few minutes, the blood could no longer be poured out of the vessel, as it had become like a jelly. After some hours this jelly becomes altered in appearance. There is a firm, solid, red part or clot, floating in a clear, pale-yellow liquid. The clot contains all the cells (red and white) of the blood entangled in a stringy substance called fibrin. The clear liquid in which the clot floats is almost the same as the blood liquid as it exists in the body. As we shall see later, clotting is Nature’s way of stopping bleeding. If it were not for this clotting power of the blood we should bleed to death, even from slight cuts and wounds. 66. We have already seen that the blood has to carry food and nourishment to the various organs and also to bring the waste substances away from them. You would therefore expect that the blood found in different parts of the body would not be exactly the same in composition, and that is really the case. In order to understand what is meant by good and bad blood, we must learn first the uses of the different parts of the blood.
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