Selected monographs.

  • New Sydenham Society
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

    238/372 page 18
    nated it is necessary that the temperature should he taken very accurately and often. We, in our experiments, had it taken every two hours from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., and sometimes also at midnight, at first using a maximum centigrade (Geissler), and when this was broken, a good Eoman one—both by a curious coincidence, indicate an error of —0°'l, as ascertained by our colleague Cannizzaro. In our tables and temperature curves this error requires to be corrected. The weight of the animals was carefully ascertained before commencing the experiments and during their course. At the beginning of malarious fevers, especially the intermittent, there is slight increase of weight; but later on, and particularly in the continuous forms, there is loss, and often rapid loss, of weight. This point is of very great importance. In malarious infection naturally occurring in man and arti- ficially produced in animals there is enlargement of the spleen, from hyperplastic tumefaction, with uniform increase of all its dimensions without loss of sharpness in its angles and borders. In septicemic enlargement the organ is uniformly rounded and altered in sectional outline. The method which we adopted to record the size of the spleen was a species of nature printing.' The convex surface of the spleen was smeared with blood and applied to sized paper to obtain an accurate print; afterwards the transverse section was so taken. In this way we obtained the figures in Table I. Another characteristic of malarious affection is the production of black pigment of hemic origin, which is not only found in perniciosa, but in milder and more chronic intermittents. In severe forms it is produced in great abundance, and is met with in the blood, spleen, and bone marrow. Unlike melanin, it con- tains iron in inorganic combination, and treated with hydrochloric acid and ferrocyanide of potassium produces Prussian blue. Its derivation direct from the blood is now ascertained. No like change of hemoglobin during life is met with in any other disease (with the exception perhaps of Melanosarcoma), and its presence is therefore a sure evidence of naturally or artificially produced malaria. Once satisfied of the identity of maladies artificially produced in animals by the injection of a crude material with those result- ing from spontaneous malarious infection in man, it becomes
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3