JOURNAL 



OF THE 



Elisha Mitchell Scientific Society 



VOLUME XXVIII DECEMBER, 1912 No. 3 



MALARIAL PIGMENT (HEMATIN) AS A FACTOR 



I]Sr THE PRODUCTION OF THE MALARIAL 



PAROXYSM.* 



By Wade H. Brown, M. D. 



It is remarkable that, from the enormous amount of inves- 

 tigation that has centered about the malarial parasite and its 

 relation to malarial fevers, there has come no clear exposition 

 of the mode of production of the various phenomena of the 

 malarial paroxysm. It is true that these phenomena have been 

 ascribed to the presence in the circulation of some toxic sub- 

 stance, or substances, elaborated by the malarial parasite, and 

 that the blood at the time of the segmentation of the parasite 

 has been shown to possess toxic properties. Still, as far as I 

 know, the nature of these toxic agents remains unknown, as 

 no one has clearly demonstrated the presence of any definite 

 substance, which, when introduced into the circulation, could 

 reproduce the symptom complex of the malarial paroxysm. 

 The observations embodied in this report are offered, therefore, 

 with the hope of shedding some light upon the question. 



In the course of some work on hematin metabolism, it was 

 noted that a rabbit that had received an intravenous injection 

 of alkaline hematin developed a very pronounced shaking chill, 

 strikingly like that of malaria. As the author has attempted 

 to show in a previous paper, ^ the pigment elaborated from the 

 hemoglobin of the red blood corpuscle by the malarial parasite 



Reprinted from the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Vol. XV, No. 6, 1912. 



* Aided by a grant from Ttie Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Re- 

 ceived for publication, March 29, 1912. 



The first seven experiments of this investigation were done in the Pathological 

 Laboratory of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis. 



1 W. H. Brown, Jour. Exper. Med., 1911, xiil, 290. 



