300 AN ADDRESS ON CORROSIVE SUBLIMATE 



I afterwards made other experiments with blood itself, and that to which 

 I will now refer was with the serum of horse's blood. My first attempt to 

 obtain serum from horse's blood failed. I wished to get the blood in an aseptic 

 state, so far as one conveniently could without going too much into detail ; 

 and I used a glass jar which I had had by me for a long time past, and which 

 had been used for experiments with regard to catgut, and had certain impurities 

 adhering to it which could not be cleaned off. I purified this with a i to 500 

 solution of corrosive sublimate, and then introduced into a horse's jugular 

 vein a glass tube purified in the same way, and through this tube drew blood 

 into the jar, and allowed it to coagulate, intending to use the serum which should 

 ooze out of the clot as it contracted. I was baffled, however, by finding myself 

 again in presence of a fact which I described somic years ago, where antiseptic 

 precautions had been used in obtaining blood ; the clot never contracted. 



When I first witnessed this fact, having found the novel procedure of anti- 

 septic precautions, in taking blood, followed by the novel phenomenon of failure 

 of the clot to contract, I was disposed to attribute the one to the other, and to 

 imagine that the destruction of the septic organisms was, in some way or other, 

 the cause of the absence of the shrinking. Then it was suggested to me that 

 Liebig had shown, in his Letters on Chemistry, that, if glasses are heated, they 

 lose, for a time, their usual property of causing certain phenomena of crystalliza- 

 tion ; and, as my glasses had been always purified by heat, there might be some 

 peculiar physical property in the glass to account for the circumstance. But 

 here we find the same phenomenon cropping up, although the glass had not 

 been purified by heat, and although it had not even a clean smooth surface. 



It may be interesting to you to observe that, though the antiseptic pre- 

 cautions used were but of a rough kind, still no genuine putrefaction has occurred, 

 in spite of the hot weather, in this blood taken on the 9th of September. But 

 the remarkable fact to which I wish to direct your attention is that, while the 

 buffy coat peculiar to horse's blood can still be recognised, it has entirely failed 

 to contract, and is to be seen adhering to the surface of the vessel. I must 

 confess it seems to me barely conceivable that the development of organisms 

 can be the cause of the contraction of the clot under ordinary circumstances, 

 considering how soon that contraction begins to come into play. Yet to what 

 else are we to attribute it ? It is to me, I confess, a perfect mystery. At the 

 same time, to us surgeons it must be admitted to be highly interesting, because 

 in antiseptic surgery, at all events, this is the very condition of things in which 

 we find the clot. We do not find a clot shrink away, or tend to do so, from the 

 sides of the wound, but it retains its original bulk until it is gradually diminished 

 by absorption and organization ; and if a clot forms in the vicinity of a ligature 



i 



