202 LECTURE VIII. 



cles generally appears more considerable than it really is, 

 from reasons which I but a short time ago pointed out 

 to you (p. 184) ; for these corpuscles possess extraordi- 

 nary adhesiveness and accumulate in considerable masses 

 wherever there is a retardation in the stream of blood, 

 so that in the dead body the greatest number is always 

 found in the right heart. Once, before I left Berlin, this 

 singular case occurred to me, that, when I punctured 

 the right auricle, the physician who had treated the case 

 cried out, astonished, " Why, there's an abscess there !" 

 So like pus did the blood appear. This puriform condi- 

 tion of the blood does not indeed pervade the entire cir- 

 culating stream ; the whole of the blood never looks like 

 pus, because a comparatively large number of red cor- 

 puscles always continues to exist ; still it sometimes hap- 

 pens that blood flowing from a vein even during life 

 exhibits whitish streaks, and that, when the fibrine has 

 been removed by stirring, and the defibrinated blood is 

 allowed to stand, a voluntary separation at once takes 

 place, the whole of the blood-corpuscles, red and colour- 

 less, gradually sinking to the bottom of the vessel, and there 

 forming a double sediment, a lower red stratum, covered 

 by an upper, white and puriform one. This is explained 

 by the difference in the specific gravity of the two kinds 

 of corpuscles and the time they take to sink (p. 186). In 

 this way too we are enabled very readily to distinguish 

 leuksemic from chylous (lipaemic) blood in which a milky 

 appearance of the liquor sanguinis is produced by the 

 admixture of fat, for, if the fibrine be removed, after 

 some time there forms not a white sediment, but a 

 cream-like layer on the surface. 



In the histories of all the known cases of leukaemia we 

 only find it once as yet recorded that the patient, after 

 he had been for some time the subject of medical treat- 

 ment, left the hospital considerably improved in health. 



