Page:Wound infections and some new methods for the study of the various factors which come into consideration in their treatment.djvu/20

6 work to get our answers—for merely looking at the wound will not help; and finally to take cognisance of the results which the experimental methods I am about to describe to you have already yielded.

Our first question can be formulated thus:

(1) Can the microbes which are found in wound infections live and multiply in the unaltered blood fluids?

In other words, if I take pyogenic microbes from the wound and implant these into the normal undiluted serum, will they grow freely? If we are going to carry out this experiment, and to carry it out repeatedly, and deal with a number of different bloods; and if we are going to cultivate directly from the pus, we shall evidently have to work in capillary tubes with very minute quantities of pus and very small quantities of undiluted serum. The technique which I have arrived at for fulfilling these requirements is a very simple one. I may call that technique the wet-wall method.