859 
EXPERIMENTS ON TRANSFUSION. 
At a recent meeting of the Vienna Academy of Sciences, 
Herr Mittler read a paper detailing his numerous experi¬ 
ments on this important problem. He finds that trans¬ 
fusion is a much less dangerous operation than has been 
supposed by medical men generally. He repeated the old 
experiment of introducing birds^ blood into the vessels 
of mammals, and found, as did previous physiologists, that 
the oval corpuscles may be distinguished for several days, 
but that ultimately they disappear. His results may be 
summed up as follows; 1. Blood directly transfused from 
one vessel to another does not provoke coagulation in 
the circulation of the animal submitted to the operation, 
whether it be allied or not to the one from which it receives 
the blood. 2. Blood directly transfused continues its func¬ 
tions within the vascular system of a kindred animal much 
more completely than blood injected after having been de¬ 
prived of its fibrin. 3. Blood directly transfused from an 
animal not allied to it is generally borne by an animal better 
and in markedly larger quantity than blood defibrinated 
previous to injection. 4. The blood-globules of mammifers 
can be seen for two or three days after in the blood of birds 
submitted to injection. 5. The narrowest capillaries of mam¬ 
malian animals present no obstacle to the passage of the 
large elliptical corpuscles of birds. 6. Suppositions still 
strongly believed in as to the toxic action of foreign blood 
are either inexact or erroneous: the coagulation of this 
blood, and the existence of the carbonic acid which it con¬ 
tains have no influence on the symptoms caused by it. 7. 
Blood injected or transfused is some time after the operation 
secreted in many cases by the kidneys. Sometimes effu¬ 
sions of blood are observed in the parenchyma of the wounds 
caused by the operation. 8. It may safely be admitted that 
blood-corpuscles thus secreted first lose their colouring 
matter and then perish like those placed without the vascular 
system. 9* The experiments in question have not definitively 
cleared up whether the transfused blood loses its physiolo¬ 
gical powers immediately on being received into a foreign 
vascular system, or whether these powers continue to exist . 
for a certain period.— Vlnditut, 
