Maladies caused by the air we breathe inside and outside the home / by Thomas Oliver.

  • Thomas Oliver
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Maladies caused by the air we breathe inside and outside the home / by Thomas Oliver. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    In a series of experiments which I carried out at the Newcastle College of Medicine with Dr. Parkin of exposing mice to high pres¬ sures of oxygen, say 10 atmospheres and upwards, we found that the breathing a few minutes afterwards became rapid and panting, that the animals would suddenly fall on their side in a state of narcosis, that the pupils dilated, and that the mice died in convulsions, even when brought into ordinary atmospheric air. The animals died asphyxiated owing to carbonic acid apparently not being removed. The haemoglobin of the red-blood corpuscles is so saturated with oxygen that it is unable to take up C02, and thus contribute to the elimination of C02 in accordance with the view put forward by Pro¬ fessor Bohr of Copenhagen. But more than this: one of the consequences of breathing oxygen under high pressure is pneumonia. High partial pressure of oxygen causes irritation and congestion of the lungs, and this may be followed by capillary haemorrhages and by consolidation, so that the lungs present all the appearances of the early stages of pneumonia. Lorrain Smith has suggested that the inflammation of the lungs may be a cause of caisson disease ; but as some of the worst cases of compressed-air illness on the Tyne occurred when the men were working at rather low pressures, and therefore not exposed to high- tension oxygen, and the lesions were on the side of the nervous system, I do not regard the lung condition nor the oxygen tension as playing any part in caisson disease. The oxygen tension under ordinary circumstances is not high enough to do this. On exposing animals to 10 atmospheres or more of oxygen, we found that convul¬ sions occurred, and we regarded them as in all probability the result of the toxic effect of oxygen upon the central nervous system. Hill maintains that it is not so much the total quantity of oxygen in the blood that produces symptoms as the tension of the oxygen in solution. Parkin and I found that mice behaved differently in the same pressures of oxygen and compressed air. Exposed to + 10 atmospheres of oxygen, mice in seven or eight minutes became convulsed; but when exposed to even higher atmospheres of compressed air for the same period no convulsions occurred, owing probably to the length of time being too short for intoxication from the oxygen in the air to occur. In our experiments with high pressures—10, 15, and 20 atmospheres, i.e., a maximum of 300 pounds pressure to the 4—2
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