427 



Fatty Degeneration of the Blood. 



By S. G. Shattock and L. S. Dudgeon. 



(Communicated by Professor J. Eose Bradford, F.E.S. Beceived March 18, — 



Bead April 18, 1907.) 



Erroneous as histological research has proved Hunter's view of the 

 organisation of effused blood to be, yet Hunter was the first to discern the 

 biological truth that the blood is alive — alive in as strict a sense as is any 

 other component part of the living body. 



To view the blood as a tissue is a natural extension of the same conception, 

 a tissue, that is, of mobile elements, and one in which the plasma repre- 

 sents a fluid, in place of a solid, intercellular material. Yet even in regard 

 to this quality we may discover gradations between the opposite extremes 

 like those presented by blood and cartilage, in such intermediate forms as 

 mucous tissue, where the intercellular substance may be equally well called 

 semi-fluid or semi-solid. 



If there is a paradox in such an application of words, it is not so much 

 that the incongruity marks an error of conception as that terms used in one 

 stage of science become inadequate to compass biological truth, which as 

 it grows under observation defies the artificial limitations which language 

 would impose upon it. 



In a similar manner has the common conception of a crystal been 

 dissipated by the sheer force of observation. For the researches of Lehmann 

 and of Schenck* have made it clear that certain fluids may retain the 

 characteristic crystalline feature of containing doubly refractive bodies. 

 The conception of a fluid crystal is not less paradoxical than that of a 

 fluid tissue. 



One peculiarity in the constitution of the blood whereby it differs from 

 other tissues is, of course, the fact that although its cells, as in the more 

 stable forms, undergo division, both mitotic and amitotic, and have in this 

 sense a life of their own, yet the primary sources of its elements are the 

 blood-forming organs — the bone-marrow, the hsemolymph and lymphatic 

 glands, or other lymphatic tissue, and the spleen. 



In considering diseases of the blood, therefore, there is a double question 

 involved : there are firstly the changes in the blood arising from disease of 

 the blood-forming organs, and, secondly, the abnormal changes of the formed 

 blood, arising from lesions proper to the blood itself. 



* • Fliissige Kristalle,' Leipzig, 1905 ; cited by J. C. Adami, F.K.S., and L. Aschoff, 

 Roy. Soc. Proc.,' B, vol. 78, 1906. 



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