Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 edition. Excerpt: ...and helps to arrest the haemorrhage and close the wound, the serum escapes and may dry up and form a scab or crust, or it may soak into the dressings applied to the wound. (See Manual No. 1.) The solid particles of the blood consist of two separate kinds of corpuscles, named red and white corpuscles, from their colour. Red Corpuscles.--When viewed under the microscope the colour of the blood is seen to be due not to the fluid part as would appear from naked-eye inspection, but to the colouring matter contained in the red corpuscles. It is in these small red corpuscles, in structure like a minute sponge, that the oxygen taken up in the lungs from the air is conveyed to all the organs and tissues of the body. White C0rpuscles.----These are fewer in number but larger in size than the red corpuscles; they are of a pale colour; their surface presents an appearance resembling finely ground glass. The proportion of the white to the red is I white to from 300 to 500 of the red. If the piece of glass (microscope slide) upon which the blood is placed is kept warm, it will be seen that the white corpuscles of freshly drawn blood change their shape, throwing out processes in one, two, or more directions, and that they are capable of moving slowly from one place to another across the field of view. These are living bodies, and they play an active part both in health and in disease. In health they are concerned with building up and renewing the tissues; in disease they play several parts: r. Some of them are endowed with the capacity of acting as blood scavengers, from the fact that they can destroy by incorporating within their substance deleterious germs of various kinds, which, in many ailments, infect the blood. The white cells possessing this...