Microscopical morphology of the animal body in health and disease / by C. Heitzmann. With 380 original engravings.

Carl Heitzmann

Date:: 1883

Credit: Microscopical morphology of the animal body in health and disease / by C. Heitzmann. With 380 original engravings. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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$STJirCTlli'h' or ('oLOlil'J) IlLooD-COUrUSCLES. i).) eertiiin jtoiiit, pjilinii occurred in an increasing deforce, and a niori)li<)loiiical s(iiictni-c l)ccainc visible at the same time that the nninifestations of life (contraction and anitt'l)oid movement) con- tinued. From this we certainly may infer that the re-ap:ent has not altered, at all events not seriously impaired, the livinj^ matter; and when we find that the structural arranjji^ements thus revealed are the same as those demonstrable without re-agents in other li\anf^ matter, the inference that they were preexisting, and not artificially ])ro(luced by the re-agent, becomes a certainty. The knowledge of the structure of colored blood-corpuscles will not enable us to solve all the problems regarding their nature ; but some questions are answered pretty conclusively by my investigation. The colored blood-corpuscle is not a cell in any proper sense of that word, Init, like the colorless coi-puscle, is an unattached portion of the living matter (bioplasson) of the body. Broadly speaking, the essential difference l>etween the two kinds of cor- puscles is the presence of haemoglobin, using this term to desig- nate the substance or substances — no doubt chemically very complicated—constituting the coloring matter under all the varjdng physiological circumstances. In size, human colored blood-corpuscles vary so much, that claims to be able to distinguish them by their size from certain other mammalian colored blood-corpuscles are inadmissible. The colored blood-corpuscle has no separate investing mem- brane ; nevertheless, the outer portion, essentially like the inner substance forming the net-work, may be considered to be differ- entiated from the latter, especially at the periphery of the disk, where it constitutes an encircling band of uniform thickness, or occasionally of a wreath-of-beads appearance. In the colored blood-corpuscles of the lower classes of vertebrate animals there is usually a nucleus to be seen, which is not the case, as a rule, in those of man, and other mammalians ; but there is in the interior of these an accumulation of matter occasionally met with, which may be interpreted as a nucleus. In the communication to the Vienna Academy, in 1873, Heitzmann demonstrated the existence of a net-work in amcebae, blood-corpuscles of astacus and of tritou, human colorless blood- corpuscles and colostrum cor2)uscles; and, from direct observa- tion of the changes in the reticulum during the contraction of the living body, announced that the substance constituting the net-work is itself the living matter or bioplasson — /. <'., ''the$