Page:The third Huxley lecture.pdf/15

11 The very liberal regulations of the University and College of Surgeons of Edinburgh enabled me, on the expiry of my house surgeoncy at the Infirmary, to start a course of lectures on surgery, qualifying for the examinations of both bodies. The first subject with which I should have to deal was inflammation. The stasis of the blood in the capillaries, as the result of irritating applications, had been long studied in the transparent web of the frog's foot; and Paget had described similar phenomena in the wing of the mammalian bat. The latest contribution to the subject had been made by Wharton Jones, one of my former teachers at University College, who had received the Astley Cooper Prize for an essay in which observations were recorded leading him to the conclusion that the cause of the arrest of the red corpuscles in the capillaries of an inflamed part was contraction of the arterioles. According to this view, which he supported by very neatly executed experiments, the narrowing of the tubes of supply caused sluggishness of flow in the fields of capillaries supplied by them, and this permitted the red discs to aggregate and so obstruct the channels.

There could be no more doubt of the trustworthiness of Wharton Jones's observations than of the beauty of the drawings with which he illustrated them. But their relation to inflammatory stasis was not so clear; and I sought further light upon the subject by investigations of my own. My first attempt in this way may be described somewhat in detail. It occurred to me