Elements of human physiology / by Henry Power.

  • Henry Power
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Elements of human physiology / by Henry Power. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the clot. It may be regarded as the plasma minus fibrin, or one of the elements of fibrin. It is clear, transparent, and yellowish in a fasting animal, but opalescent after a full meal, owing to the quantity of chyle, containing minute fat drops, that has been poured into it. It has an alkaline reaction, chiefly owing to the presence of salts of sodium. Its specific gravity is about 1027. A thousand grammes of blood yield between 440 and 525 grammes of serum. It contains about 10 per cent, of solids, of which the most abundant are the proteids, and especially serum albumin (4 per cent.) and paraglobulin (3 per cent.), but it also contains many other organic compounds. The most important of these are sugar, urea, uric acid, and kreatin. The presence of sugar in normal blood may be demonstrated by the reduction of copper oxide in the usual way, and it seems probable that the sugar is either grape sugar or maltose. In nursing women the serum has been shown to contain lactose. Part of the sugar is derived from absorption by the veins of the alimentary canal, for Mehring found that on dieting animals with dextrin or starch, a substance could be obtained from portal though not from hepatic venous blood the reducing power of which was increased on boiling with dilute acids, and which was therefore either dextrin or maltose. The quantity of sugar in the serum is greatly augmented in diabetes. Urea is present in minute proportion, as are also uric acid and kreatin; cholesterin and lecithin, in small but variable quantity, are always to be discovered in blood serum. 8alts of the Mood.—There is a remarkable difference in the distribution of the salts of the blood between the corpuscles and the plasma. Thus, 1000 parts of moist corpuscles yield (exclusive of iron) 8 parts of mineral matter, of which potassium forms 3-3 parts, phosphorus pentoxide 1*1 parts, sodium 1 part, and chlorine 1*7 parts, calcium, magnesium, and
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