Observations on the blood : with reference to its peculiar condition in the morbus Brightii / by George Owen Rees.

  • George Owen Rees
Date:
[between 1840 and 1849]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on the blood : with reference to its peculiar condition in the morbus Brightii / by George Owen Rees. 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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    already been demonstrated concerning the corpuscle, can never occur; inasmuch as destruction of the inclosing mem- brane of the corpuscle is necessary before its colouring matter can be extracted: after which violence, it is obvious that any soft solid maintaining a definite form, and which can be seen and measured under the microscope, must be some constituent of original organized structure, which has now become disintegrated. The opinion, that the membranes of the blood-corpuscles, notwithstanding their extreme tenuity, possessed in common with other animal structures the property of admitting the passage of fluids in accordance with the law of endosmose, and which was first noticed and described by Mr. Lane and myself in the Guy’s Hospital Reports, has been, up to the present time, entirely supported by microscopic evidence. I am anxious, on the present occasion, to prove the truth of this view, by relating some experiments conducted on large quantities of blood; not only more firmly to establish a ne- cessary premise to my conclusions, but also to shew that the correctness of opinions, the results of microscopic examina- tion, occasionally admits of being proved by experiments conducted on masses visible to the unassisted eye. Now, if it be true that liquors pass in and out of the blood-corpuscles in proportions bearing a ratio to their specific gravities, then, if a large quantity of corpuscles be collected, we ought, by treating them with solutions of different densities, to be able to produce conditions which will differently affect their con- tents ; the higher specific gravities taking out large propor- tions of those contents; the lower specific gravities removing less from within the corpuscle : and our liquors obtained after deposition has occurred ought to be differently coloured ac- cordingly : some should be deeply tinged with red; others almost white, having, from their less-specific gravity, entered the corpuscle in large proportion, and only drawn out a very small quantity of its coloured liquor. The results obtained from experiments conducted as above described have been in exact accordance with those micro- scopic views, the correctness of which they were intended to test: thus, when a quantity of corpuscles obtained by subsi- dence from serum were mixed with a solution of common