121 



1 \I.I,AIIK!S AM) I'l-ZZLKS IN HI.OUl) EXAMINATION 



Uses of the 



Folia 



H,tmatotiiigi(a 



" Howell and 



Horrocks" 



bodies 



There are iiiaii\ oilier points with which one might deal, including conditions met 

 with in smears from such organs as the spleen and liver, but I feel that a paper of 

 this kind should not be too cumbersome and, after all, the ordinary clinical and laboratory 

 worker does not find it necessary as a rule to i)lungc very deeply into the abstruse 

 aspects of hajmatology. In any case he will find the Folia Jhvmatoloyica a mine of 

 wealth, and realise how very far we are behind the Germans in a full knowledge and right 

 understanding of well-nigh everything connected with the blood. Our text-books, though 

 practical, avoid altogether those doubtful subjects which are often those on which light 

 is required, and I trust that some one witii time, leisure, and tlie necessary knowledge, 

 will produce an English work which may aid tiiose of us who have little time to read 

 lengthy German papers, who have to work l)oth at human and animal blood, and who 

 are constantly meeting with appearances wbicli we either cannot explain or class vaguely 

 as degenerations. 



It may, however, be as well to make mention of a few recent and little known 

 discoveries of true haematozoa, either in human or animal blood so that the worker in 

 the Tropics may be on the look-out for these or similar parasites. 



Taking the human blood first, there is the ectoglobular, vermiform parasite found 

 by the brothers Sergent in Algeria and now named by Brumpt Serfjetitclla homiiiis. It 

 is something like the leucocytozoon of a bird in shape, being pointed at the ends and 

 containing a large oblong nucleus at its centre. These parasites exhibited periodicity, 

 disappearing from the blood in the evening, and may have been the cause of the nausea 

 and night sweats from which their human host suffered. In some illustrations it looks 

 not unlike Nuttall's buflfalo spirochtete and my hartebeeste forms. Somewhat crescentic 

 and vacuolated bodies found by Castellani and Willey in human febrile cases and by 

 Castellani and Sturgess in Bos tiidiruii also merit consideration. 



Then there is the unknown protozoon found by Hoefer in a case of anasmia at 

 Leipzig, in a woman who had never been away from the neighbourhood of that city. It 

 stains like a malarial parasite, shows chromatin, occurs in the red cells as rings or as 

 curved pyriform bodies, and also apparently as a large blue staining mass, dotted with 

 tine chromatin granules and rather like a benign tertian pai-asite, but devoid of pigment. 

 In the jjlasma, double, possibly dividing, free forms occur which may show two nuclei 

 each, and are either pear or somewhat spindle-shaped. There is also another free form 

 something like a stout vermicule. 



It would be well to bear in mind the possible occurrence of hiemogregarines in 

 human blood of the type found in certain manmials. 



One does not know what the X bodies of Howell and Horrocks me, l)ut, un ihey 

 seem to be associated with febrile conditions, they may be of a parasitic nature, though, if 

 so, they are something entirely novel. I have seen them once in the blood of a sick dog, 

 and the following is the description given of them when stained with Leishman's stain : — 



The bodies, when stained, were characterised by a faint capsule with a circular 

 centre, staining deep blue ; they varied in size, some being as large as a red corpuscle, 

 others only about one-eighth the size of a red corpuscle. In addition to these forms, 

 which were the most common, the following were also seen : - 



(n) A small, blue circular centre surrounded by four or more faint capsules 

 concentrically arranged ; (h) two circular bodies, each having a dark blue central 

 point surrounded by a light blue ring enveloped in one capsule which appeared indented 

 as if two capsules were in process of formation ; (c) similar to {b), but the part 

 surrounding the deep blue centre stained a deeper blue, and two indented capsules were 



