90 THE PROTEOMORPHIC THEORY AND THE NEW MEDICINE 



conditions, there are five million individuals in each cubic mil- 

 limeter of the blood-plasm. 



In some of the lower mammals the number is far larger in 

 the goat, for example, upward of ten million; in the sheep, up- 

 ward of fourteen million. Goat and sheep are not inordinately 

 active creatures. Their oxygen needs can scarcely be so great 

 as those of birds, which are said to have only from one million 

 to four million red corpuscles to the cubic millimeter. But the 

 herbivorous animals ingest large quantities of protein-bearing 

 foods, and it is probable that the proteolytic demands made upon 

 their corpuscles are far greater than in case of animals whose 

 diet includes a large proportion of carbonaceous and fatty foods. 



But, regardless of relative numbers, the red corpuscles lead 

 a precarious life. Millions on millions of these cells are anni- 

 hilated every hour in the juggernaut of the liver. It has been 

 estimated that the destruction amounts to three per cent, of the 

 total number each day say, 150,000 corpuscles to each cubic mil- 

 limeter of blood, or an aggregate bulk of perhaps sixty grams 

 in the entire body. To gain a clear conception of what this means, 

 recall that, according to Atwater's estimate, a man of average 

 size requires only 92 grams of protein daily to maintain the 

 nitrogen balance. Chittenden makes the amount far less. Yet 

 the ranks of the corpuscles thus perpetually depleted are no less 

 perpetually replenished. To build the new cells requires a con- 

 stant supply of materials capable of being elaborated into an 

 intricate type of protein. To build each molecule of this proto- 

 plasm requires some thousands, in the aggregate, of atoms of 

 carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and the elusive nitrogen ; some 

 hundreds of molecules of amino-acids, the materials directly 

 utilized. 



The total energy required in the building up of these intricate 

 molecules in the bodies of uncountable myriads of red corpuscles 

 hour after hour and year after year, throughout the life of the 

 individual organisms, is colossal. Each red corpuscle is a pro- 

 teid body, its substance composed in part of hemoglobin, the 

 formula for which has been computed as C 758 H 1203 N 195 O 218 S 3 . 

 To suppose that the organism exhausts this material and wastes 

 the energy essential to its compounding merely to produce a trans- 

 porter of unmodified oxygen would require a reversal of all our 

 conceptions of economy of management in the cellular body poli- 

 tic. Yet such is the current conception of physiologists in general. 



But there has been experimental evidence at hand for many 

 years that, if properly interpreted, would dispel this miscon- 

 ception. As long ago as 1872 Bauer, in Voit's laboratory, stud- 

 ied the results of bloodletting in the dog, and found that when 

 from eighteen to twenty-seven per cent, of the total blood in the 



