CHAPTER V. 



THE GERMICIDAL PROPERTIES OF BLOOD SERUM. 



As earlj as 1872 Lewis and Cunningham demonstrated the fact 

 that bacteria injected into the circulation rapidly disappear. In the 

 blood of twelve animals that had been treated with such injections 

 bacteria could be found after six hours in only seven. In a second 

 series of thirty, bacteria were found after twenty-four hours in the 

 blood of only fourteen, and in a third experiment involving seven- 

 teen animals, bacteria were found in only two, when the examination 

 was made from two to seven days after the injection. 



In 1874 Traube and Grscheidlen found that arterial blood, taken 

 under aseptic precautions, from rabbits into the jugular vein of 

 which one and one-half c.c. of a fluid rich in putrefactive germs had 

 been injected forty-eight hours previously, failed to undergo decom- 

 position for months. These investigators attributed the germicidal 

 properties of the blood to the ozonized oxygen. Similar results 

 were obtained by Fodor and by Wyssokowitsch. The latter accounted 

 for the disappearance of the germs, not by supposing that they were 

 destroyed in the blood, but that they found lodgment in the capil- 

 laries. 



The first experiments made with extra-vascular blood were con- 

 ducted by Grohmann under the direction of A. Schmidt in his re- 

 searches upon the cause of coagulation. It was found that anthrax 

 bacilli, after being kept in plasma, were less virulent, as was demon- 

 strated by their effect upon rabbits, and Grohmann supposed that in 

 some way the bacteria were influenced by the process of coagulation. 



In 1887 Fodor made a second contribution to this subject, and in 

 this he combated the retention theory of Wyssokowitsch. One 

 minute after the injection of one c.c. of anthrax culture into the jugu- 

 lar vein, in eight samples of blood, Fodor found only one colony of 

 the bacillus. He then took the blood from the heart with a sterilized 

 pipette and added anthrax bacilli to it. This was kept at 38°, and 

 plates made from time to time showed a rapid diminution of the 

 number of germs ; after a time, when the blood had lost its germi- 

 cidal properties, the number of bacteria began to increase. 



In 1888, Nuttall, working under the direction of Fliigge, used 

 defibrinated blood taken from various species of animals — rabbits, 

 mice, pigeons, and sheep — and found that this blood destroyed the 

 bacillus anthracis, bacillus subtilis, bacillus megaterium and staphyl- 

 ococcus pyogenes aureus when brought in contact with them. He 



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