INFECTION AND IMMUNITY. 585 



under observation for a long time. As a result of these 

 experiments, the question that naturally presented itself 

 was : Does the animal organism possess the power of 

 rendering septic organisms inert, and if so, to what 

 extent? They believed this power of rendering living 

 organisms inert to be possessed by the circulating 

 blood to only a limited degree, for after the injection 

 of much larger amounts of the putrid fluid into the 

 blood of the animal death usually ensued in from 

 twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The blood drawn 

 from the animal just before death contained the living 

 bacteria of putrefaction and promptly underwent decom- 

 position. They attributed the germicidal phenomenon 

 to the action of the " ozonized oxygen of the corpuscles 

 of the blood." 



Similar observations were made in 1885 by Fodor, 1 

 who remarks upon the rapidity with which living bac- 

 teria disappear from the circulating blood of animals ; 

 and AVyssokowitsch, 2 who endeavored to explain this 

 disappearance 'experimentally, went wide of the mark 

 by concluding that they were filtered from the blood 

 and digested by the parenchymatous tissues. 



In 1882 Rauschenbach 3 demonstrated that when in 

 the process of coagulation fibrin was formed, it was not 

 as a specific product of the action of the colorless ele- 

 ments of the blood alone, but also as a result of the 

 combined action between all animal protoplasms and 

 healthy blood-plasma, and that in the process there was 

 always a disintegration of the leucocytes present. In 



1 Fodor : Archiv fur Hygiene, Bd. iv. S. 129. 



2 Wyssokowitsch : Zeitschrift fur Hygiene, 1886, S. 3. 



3 Uober die Wechselwirkung zwischen Protoplasma und Blutplasma. 



Dissertation, Dorpat, 1882. 



