Addison and the white corpuscles : an aspect of nineteenth-century biology / L. J. Rather.

  • Rather, L. J.
Date:
1972 [i.e. 1971]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Addison and the white corpuscles : an aspect of nineteenth-century biology / L. J. Rather. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    We recall that in 1842 Addison had been taken to task by Wharton Jones for stating that the buffy coat was formed by the coalescence of the colourless corpuscles in the blood. Addison had denied the charge, although on rather shaky grounds. But now we find him returning to his original opinion or to one very close to it. Microscopic observation of the upper layer of ' inflammatory ' blood before coagulation takes place has now convinced him that the white corpuscles disintegrate during coagulation. They are resolved into 'molecules' and it is from these molecules or disintegrated corpuscles that ' fibrinous filaments shoot out on all sides, as from so many centres '. Addison now thinks it highly prob able that all of the molecules met with free in the blood, as well as the ' plastic fibrillating liquid ' of the blood are derived from the interior of the white corpuscles. 3 Neither the fibrin of the blood nor the serum (the fluid seen in fully clotted blood) are present as such in the circulating fluid. Instead, both are enclosed within the colourless blood corpuscles. What then is the nature of the fluid in which the corpuscles move ? Addison has no answer, since this fluid cannot be procured without causing the rupture of at least a few of the corpuscles. 4 It is still common today for physiologists to call the blood, somewhat metaphorically, a 'tissue'. This expression ori ginated early in the nineteenth century, but its meaning was then much stronger and more literal. Addison, Gulliver and many others, probably the majority of investigators at the time, thought of the blood as a fluid 'potential' tissue; the buffy coat or inflammatory crust, on the other hand, was an actual tissue, occupying the same level as the other tissues making up the structure of the animal body. Addison calls the fluid that appears briefly at the surface of inflammatory blood after it has been drawn and allowed to stand a ' plastic fluid'. When this fluid fibrillates, following the dis integration of its white corpuscles, 'it incorporates the molecules and unruptured corpuscles, forming tissue'. 5 While still within the body the circulating tissue may leave the blood-vessels and in the same way become incorporated into the solid structures. 6—A.W.C. 71