Sir M. Foster

21. What, then, is this blood which does so much?

Did you ever look through a good microscope at the thin transparent web of a frog’s foot, and watch the red blood coursing along its narrow channels? If not, go and look at it at once; you will never understand any physiology till you have done so. There you will see a network of delicate passages far finer than any of your own hairs, and through those passages a tumbling crowd of tiny oval yellow globules hurrying and jostling along. Some of the passages are wider than others, and through some of the wider ones you will see a thick stream of globules rushing onwards towards the smaller channels, and spreading out among them. The globules which you see are floating in a fluid so clear that you cannot see it. Some of the smaller channels are so narrow that only one globule or corpuscle, as we may call it, can pass through at a time, and very frequently you may see them passing in single file. Watching them as they glide along these narrow paths, you will note that at last they tumble again into wider passages, somewhat like those from which they came, except that the stream runs away from instead of towards the narrower channels; and in the stream the corpuscle you are watching shoots out of sight. The finest passages are called capillaries; they are guarded by delicate walls which you can hardly see; they seem to you passages only, and how fine and small they are will come home to you when you recollect that all you are looking at is going on in the depths of a skin which is so thin that perhaps you would be inclined to say it has no thickness at all.

The larger channels which are bringing the blood down to the capillaries are the ends of vessels like those which in the rabbit you learnt to call arteries, and the other larger channels through which the blood is rushing away from the capillaries are the beginnings of veins.

When you have watched this frog’s foot for some little time, turn away and reflect that in almost every part of your own body, in every square inch, in almost every square line, something very similar might be seen could the microscope be brought to bear upon it, only the corpuscles are smaller and round, the capillaries narrower and for the most part more thick-set, and the race a swifter one. In the muscle of which we were speaking in the last lesson, each of the soft long fibres of which the muscle is composed is wrapped round with a close network of these tiny capillaries, through which, as long as life lasts, for ever rushes a swift stream of blood, reddened by countless numbers of tiny corpuscles.

In every part of your flesh, in your brain and spinal cord, in your skin, your bones, your lungs, in all organs and in nearly every part of your body, there is the same hurrying rush through narrow tubes of red corpuscles and of the clear fluid in which these swim.

If you prick your finger it bleeds. Almost any part of your body would bleed were you to prick it. So thick-set are the little blood-vessels, that wherever you thrust a needle, be it as fine a needle as you please, you will be sure to pierce and tear some little blood channel, either artery or capillary or vein, and out will come the ruddy drop.

22. What is blood? It is a fluid; it runs about like water: yet it is thicker than water, thicker for two reasons. In the first place, water, that is pure water, is all one substance. If you were to look at it with ever so powerful a microscope, you would see nothing in it. It is exceedingly transparent—you can see very well through ever such a thickness of clean water. But if you were to try and look through even a very thin sheet of blood spread out between two glass plates, you would find that you could see very little; blood is very opaque. If again you examine a drop of your blood with a microscope, what do you see? A number of little

A. Moderately magnified. The red corpuscles are seen lying in rows like rolls of coins; at a and a are seen two white corpuscles.

B. Red corpuscles much more highly magnified, seen in face; C. ditto, seen in profile; D. ditto, in rows, rather more highly magnified; E. a red corpuscle swollen into a sphere by imbibition of water.

F. A white corpuscle magnified same as B.; G. ditto, throwing out some blunt processes; K. ditto, treated with acetic acid, and showing nucleus, magnified same as D.

H. Red corpuscles puckered or crenate all over.

I. Ditto, at the edge only.

round bodies, the blood discs or blood corpuscles (Fig. 4, A). If you look carefully you will notice that most of them are round, as B; but every now and then you see something like C. That is one of the round ones seen sideways; for they are not round or spherical like a ball, but circular and dimpled in the middle, something like certain kinds of biscuit. When you see one by itself it looks a little yellow in colour, that is all; but when you see them in a lump, the lump is clearly red. Remember how small they are: three thousand of them put flat in a line, edge to edge, like a row of draughts, would just about stretch across one inch. All the redness there is in blood belongs to them. When you see one of them, you see so little of the redness that it seems yellow. If you were to put a drop of blood into a tumbler of water, the water would not be stained red, but only just turned of a yellowish tint, so little redness would be given to it by the drop of blood. In the same way a very very thin slice of currant jelly would look yellowish, not red.

These red corpuscles are not hard solid things, but delicate and soft, very tender, very easily broken to pieces, more like the tiniest lumps of red jelly than anything else, and yet made so as to bear all the squeezing which they get as they are driven round and round the body.

Besides these red corpuscles, you may see if you look attentively other little bodies, just a little bigger than the red corpuscles, not coloured at all, and not circular and flat, but quite round like a ball (Fig. 4, a, F, G). That is to say, these are very often quite round, only they have a curious trick of changing their form. Imagine you were looking at a suet dumpling so small that about two thousand five hundred of them could be placed side by side in the length of one inch—and suppose the round dumpling while you were looking at it gradually changed into the shape of a three-cornered tart, and then into a rounded square, and then into the shape of a pear, and then into a thing that had no shape at all, and then back again into a round ball, and kept doing this apparently all of its own accord while you were looking at it—wouldn’t you think it very curious? Well, one of these little bodies in the blood of which we are speaking, and which are called white corpuscles, may be seen, when a drop of blood is watched under the microscope, to go on in this way, continually changing its shape. But of these white corpuscles of the blood, and of their wonderful movements, you will learn more as you go on in your physiological studies.

23. Besides these red and white corpuscles there is nothing else very important in the blood that you can see with the microscope; but their being in the blood is one reason why blood is thicker than water.

Did you ever see a pig or sheep killed? If so, you would be sure to notice that the blood ran quite fluid from the blood-vessels in the neck, ran and was spilt like so much water—but that very soon the blood caught in the pail or spilt on the stones became quite solid, so that you could pick it up in lumps. Whenever blood is shed from the living body, within a short time it becomes solid. This becoming solid is called the clotting or coagulation of blood.

What makes it clot? Suppose while the blood was running from the pig’s neck into the butcher’s pail, and while it was still quite fluid, you were to take a bunch of twigs and keep slowly stirring the blood round and round in the pail. You would naturally expect that the blood would soon begin to clot, would get thicker and thicker and more and more difficult to stir. But it does not; and if you keep on stirring long enough you will find that it never clots at all. By continually stirring it you will prevent its clotting. Now take out your bundle of twigs: you will find it covered all over with a thick reddish mass of some soft sticky substance; and if you pump on the red mass you will be able to wash away all its red colour, and will have nothing left but a quantity of white, soft, sticky, stringy material, all entangled and matted together among the twigs of your bundle. This stringy material is in reality made up of a number of fine, delicate, soft, elastic threads or fibres, and is called fibrin.

You see, by stirring, or, as it is frequently called, whipping the blood with the bundle of twigs, you have taken the fibrin out of the blood, and so prevented its clotting.

If you were to take one of the clotted lumps of blood that were spilt on the ground or a bit of the clot from a pail in which the blood had not been whipped, and wash it long enough, you would find at last that all the colour went away from the lump, and you had nothing left but a small quantity of white stringy substance. This white stringy substance is fibrin—exactly the same thing you got on your bundle of twigs.

If the blood is carefully caught in a pail, and afterwards not disturbed at all, it clots into a solid mass. The whole of the blood seems to have changed into a complete jelly; and if you turn it out of the pail, as you may do, it keeps its shape, and gives you quite a mould of the pail, a great trembling red jelly just the shape of the inside of the pail.

But if you were to leave the blood in the pail for a few hours or for a day, you would find, instead of the large jelly quite filling the pail, a smaller but firmer jelly covered by or floating in a colourless or very pale yellow liquid. This smaller, firmer jelly, which in the course of a day or so would get still firmer and smaller, would in fact go on shrinking in size, you may still call the clot; the clear fluid in which it is floating is called serum.

What has taken place is as follows. Soon after blood is shed there is formed in it a something which was not present in it before. This something, which we call fibrin, starts as a multitude of fine tender threads which run in all directions through the mass of blood, forming a close network everywhere. So the blood is shut up in an immense number of little chambers formed by the meshes of the fibrin; and it is this which makes it seem a jelly. But each thread of fibrin as soon as it is formed begins to shrink, and the blood in each of these little chambers is squeezed by the shrinking of its walls of fibrin, and tries to make its way out. The corpuscles get caught in the meshes, but all the rest of the blood passes between the threads and comes out on the top and sides of the pail. And this goes on until you have left in the clot very little besides corpuscles entangled in a network of fibrin, and all the rest of the blood has been squeezed outside the clot, and is then called serum. Serum, then, is blood out of which the corpuscles have been strained by the process of clotting.

Now I dare say you are ready to ask the question, If blood clots so readily when it is shed, why does it not clot inside the body? Why is our blood ever fluid? This is rather a difficult question to answer. When blood is shed from the warm body it soon gets cool. But it does not clot and become solid because it gets cool, as ordinary jelly does. If you keep it from getting cool it clots all the same, in fact quicker, and if kept cold enough will not clot at all. Nor does it clot when shed, because it has become still, and is no longer rushing round through the blood-vessels. Nor is it because it is exposed to the air. Perhaps we don’t know exactly why it is, and you will have much to learn hereafter about the coagulation of blood. All I will say at present is that as long as the blood is in the body there is something at work to keep it from clotting. It does clot sometimes in the body, and blood-vessels get plugged with the clots; but that constitutes a very dangerous disease.

24. Well, blood is thicker than water because it contains solid corpuscles and fibrin. But even the serum, i.e. blood out of which both fibrin and corpuscles have been taken, is thicker than water.

You know that if you were to take a basinful of pure water and boil it, it would boil away to nothing. It would all go off in steam. But if you were to try to boil a basinful of serum, you would find several curious things happen.

In the first place you would not be able to boil it at all. Before you got it as hot as boiling water, your serum, which before seemed quite as liquid as water, only feeling a little sticky if you put your finger in it, would all become quite solid. You know the difference between a raw and a boiled egg. The white of the raw egg, though very sticky and ropy, or viscid as it is called, is still liquid; you will find it hard work if you try to cut it with a knife. The white of the hard boiled egg, on the other hand, is quite solid, and you can cut it into ever so thin slices. It has been “set” by boiling. Well, the serum of blood is in this respect very like white of egg. In fact they both contain the same substance, called albumin, which has this property of “setting” or becoming solid when heated nearly to boiling-point. Both the serum of blood and white of egg even when “set” are wet, i.e. contain a great deal of water. You may dry them in the proper manner into a transparent horny substance. When quite dry they will readily burn. They are therefore things which can be oxidized. When burnt they give off carbonic acid, water, and ammonia; the latter you might easily recognize by its effect on your nose if you were to burn a piece of dried blood in a flame. Now, when I say that albumin in burning gives off carbonic acid, water, and ammonia, you know from your Chemistry that it must contain carbon to form the carbonic acid, hydrogen to form water, and nitrogen to form ammonia. It need not contain oxygen, for as you know it could get all the oxygen it wanted from the air; still it does contain some oxygen. Albumin, then, is an oxidizable or combustible body made up of nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. It is important you should remember this; but I will not bother you with how much of each—it is a very complex substance, built up in a wonderful way, far more complex than any of the things you had to learn about in your Chemistry Primer. And this albumin, dissolved in a great deal of water, forms the serum of blood.

I did not say anything about what fibrin was made of; but it, like albumin, is made up of nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. It is not quite the same thing as albumin, but first cousin to it. There is another first cousin to both of them, also containing nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, which together with a great deal of water forms muscle; another forms a great part of the red corpuscles; and scattered all over the body in various places, there are first cousins to albumin, all containing nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, all combustible, and all when burnt giving off carbonic acid, water, and ammonia. All these first cousins go under one name; they are all called proteids.

25. Well, then, blood is thicker than water by reason of the proteids in the corpuscles, in the fibrin, and in the serum, but there is something else besides. I will not trouble you with the crowd of things of which there are perhaps just a few grains in a gallon of blood, like the little pinches of things a cook puts into a savoury dish; though, as you go on in your studies, you will find that these, like many other little things in the world, are of great importance.

But I will ask you to remember this. If you take some dried blood and burn it, though you may burn all the proteids (and some other of the trifles I spoke of just now) away, you will not be able to burn the whole blood away. Burn as long as you like, you will always have left a quantity of what you have learnt from your Chemistry to call ash, and if you were to examine this ash you would find it contained ever so many elements; sulphur, phosphorus, chlorine, potassium, sodium, calcium, and iron, being the most abundant and most important.

Blood, then, is a very wonderful fluid: wonderful for being made up of coloured corpuscles and colourless fluid, wonderful for its fibrin and power of clotting, wonderful for the many substances, for the proteids, for the ashes or minerals, for the rest of the things which are locked up in the corpuscles and in the serum.

But you will not wonder at it when you come to see that the blood is the great circulating market of the body, in which all the things that are wanted by all parts, by the muscles, by the brain, by the skin, by the lungs, liver, and kidney, are bought and sold. What the muscle wants, it, as we have seen, buys from the blood; what it has done with it sells back to the blood; and so with every other organ and part. As long as life lasts this buying and selling is for ever going on, and this is why the blood is for ever on the move, sweeping restlessly from place to place, bringing to each part the things it wants, and carrying away those with which it has done. When the blood ceases to move, the market is blocked, the buying and selling cease, and all the organs die, starved for the lack of the things which they want, choked by the abundance of things for which they have no longer any need.

We have now to learn how the blood is thus kept continually on the move.