Manual of pathological anatomy / by C.Handfield Jones and Edward H. Sieveking edited by Joseph Frank Payne.

Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Manual of pathological anatomy / by C.Handfield Jones and Edward H. Sieveking edited by Joseph Frank Payne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    CHAPTER II. MORBID STATES OF THE BLOOD. The saying attributed to Cuvier, “Le sang est chair coulant,” expresses very fairly the relations that subsist between the nutrient circulating fluid and the solid tissues. As we have already remarked, a change in the former involves almost necessarily a change in the latter, and each of the vital actions of the latter exerts some influence on the former. It is manifest, therefore, that an acquaintance with the healthy properties and morbid alterations of the blood is absolutely essential to a correct study of the phenomena wrought by disease in the solid parts. But the blood itself is a very compound thing, not only as regards the number of different matters it contains, organic and inorganic, not only as regards the manifold additions which it receives from with- out in the way of nutriment, and those which are poured back into it as the effete residues of tissues, but also as regards its own mor- phological condition, being made up of solid and of fluid parts, of organized particles floating in an organic liquid. In diseased states of the blood these several parts, or some of their constituents, may be separately affected, and it seems therefore desirable on this account, as well as for the sake of greater precision, to examine first the individual component elements of this fluid with reference to their pathological changes, and afterwards to consider the diseases of the blood taken as a whole. Regarding the blood per se, this inquiry would rather belong to special than to general Pathology, but we include it under the latter head on account of the manifest general relations of the blood. RED AND WHITE CORPUSCLES. The circulating fluid consists, as we know, of two kinds of organized particles, or corpuscles, floating in a transparent colour- less fluid, called the Plasma, or Liquor sanguinis. The organized particles aro the red corpuscles, preponderating immensely in num- ber, and giving to the fluid its characteristic colour, and the white