84 PROPERTIES OF 



white. That on the 25th, in the morning, he again complained 

 of a pain in his head, and about ten o'clock his nose began to 

 bleed again ; but the serum now appeared no whiter than whey. 

 That he continued to lose blood during most part of the night, 

 so that it was supposed he could not lose less than two or three 

 pounds, the serum all this time being a little whitish, but so 

 little, that the bottom of the vessel in which it stood could now 

 be seen through it. That his bleeding returned repeatedly till 

 the 3d of October, when it entirely stopped, the serum having 

 become more transparent towards the last." 



Mr. Eustace, apothecary in Jermyn street,, sent me a phial 

 of white serum from one of his patients, by trade a butcher. 

 " This man," he told me, " was tall, of a strong make, a hard 

 drinker, subject to puke every morning, took little food, 

 sweated a good deal, but did not waste in his flesh. He was 

 bled for a slight asthma to which he was subject, and of which 

 he had always been relieved by bleeding. In other respects 

 he was in a good state of health, so as to follow his business 

 without much inconvenience." 



Besides these cases, my friend Mr. Lambert, surgeon at 

 Newcastle-upon-Tyne, told me, " that he had a patient some 

 years ago with a violent rheumatic pain in his hip, whom he 

 was obliged to bleed thrice, and every time his serum was as 

 white as milk, but the coagulum of its natural colour. This 

 gentleman," Mr. Lambert adds, " was a free liver, of a full 

 make, but rather muscular than corpulent, and remarkable for 

 being a great walker." 



When I first saw this unusual colour of the serum, I was 

 inclined to adopt the opinion of those who have attempted to 

 explain it by the patient's being bled soon after a meal, or be- 

 fore the chyle was converted into blood. But afterwards, on 

 considering the cases above related, I found this could by no 

 means be the cause, as none of these patients had taken a suf- 

 ficient quantity of food to occasion this appearance; on the 

 contrary, most of them had a bad appetite, and had taken re- 

 markably little food, and were subject to vomitings. I there- 

 fore concluded it was owing to something else, and what con- 

 firmed me in this opinion was an observation I had repeatedly 

 made in dissecting geese, whose serum I had frequently seen 

 white, whilst their chyle was transparent ; although they had 



