Changes of the blood in disease / translated from the French of M. Gibert by John H. Dix.

  • Camille-Melchior Gibert
Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Changes of the blood in disease / translated from the French of M. Gibert by John H. Dix. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    Blood is a red fluid in the mammifera, birds, fishes, reptiles and annelida; colourless in the mollusca, Crustacea, and arachnida, in- sects and zoophytes, and serves to nourish different parts of animals and contributes to the formation of products secreted by certain of their organs. Studying the blood after it has been abstracted from the body, is really but making an autopsy of it, if we may be allowed so to speak, and the longer its examination is postponed after its abstrac- tion, the less favourable will be the conditions for ascertaining its real nature, as entering into the composition of a living body. Many microscopical observations, and even chemical analyses have been erroneous from the necessity of studying these fluids after they have lost the characteristics of life. M. Donne now renounces many of the results at which he had arrived by this common method, and confides only in those which he obtains after the plan of Mandl, which consists in observing the blood the moment it is extracted from the capillary vessels by means of a puncture. By this new and more rigorous method, he has not met with those changes of the globules which he had at first announced in typhoid fever. After numerous researches, he has found but two cases in which the blood is essentially changed in its physical con- stitution. One of these cases was chlorosis, in which the number of sanguineous globules was evidently diminished, as M. Lecanu had ascertained by the ordinary method ; the other an albuminous nephritis with dropsy, in which the mucous globules of the blood had become much more numerous, and the sanguineous ones much less so. After the last very thorough experiments of Midler, (Annales des sciences naturelles 1832.) the blood must undoubtedly be con- sidered as serum holding in solution fibrine, and in suspension globules containing the colouring matter and iron. The serum itself is but water holding in solution salts, (chloruret of sodium and potassium, subcarbonate of lime, magnesia and iron, &c.) albumen, and some other constituents less important, or whose existence is not admitted by all chemists, such as a fatty crystailizable matter dis- covered by M. Chevreul, an oily matter, extractive matters, osma- zome, and perhaps cholesterine. But before we proceed any farther, we must pause for a moment to consider the globules of the blood, which have been the subject of so much microscopical research,1 from the seventeenth century [For the translation of the notes to this treatise I am indebted to my friend Dr. J. F. W. Lane, of this city. J. H. D.] 1 Malpighi records, in 1665, the discovery of the globules of the blood, (De amento et adiposis ductibus, oper. omn. London, 1686.) Leuwenhoeck says, that he saw, for the first time, the globules of the blood on the 15th of August, 1673. He estimates their volume at the hundredth part of a grain of sand. (Philos. trans., 1674, p. 23. 121; 1675, p. 380, &c.)