SCIENTIFIC PROCEEDINGS 



Abstracts of Communications. 



Ninety-Sixth meeting. 



College of Physicians and Surgeons, January 15, 1919- 

 President Gies in the chair. 



28 (1403) 



The mechanism of corpuscle and serum anaphylaxis in the rabbit. 

 By Arthur F. Coca. 



[From the New York Orthopedic Hospital, New York.] 



1. In rabbits dying acutely after a reinjection of corpuscles 

 or after a primary injection of pig's corpuscles, the pulmonary 

 circulation is found to be impermeable to saline solution under 

 pressures so much greater than the maximal normal blood pressure 

 in the pulmonary artery of that animal (over four times as great 

 in some instances) that a sufficient immediate cause of death under 

 these circumstances is seen in this physiologically complete inter- 

 ruption of the pulmonary circulation. 



2. This obstruction of the pulmonary circulation is not due to 

 an agglutination of the corpuscles and it may reasonably be re- 

 ferred to an effect on the muscular coat of the arterioles because 

 the same phenomenon is produced by the injection of dissolved 

 corpuscles and by the reaction of acute serum anaphylaxis — 

 active and passive — and also by the introduction of the antigen 

 into the pulmonary circulation after the latter has been perfused 

 for five minutes with saline solution. 



3. In the light of these observations, the local effect of Arthus 

 would seem reasonably explicable as an area of infarction due to 

 the interference with the blood supply to the area. 



4. The cachexia and late death of rabbits in serum anaphylaxis 

 offered, in the one instance of this kind, examined, a pathological 



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