Page:Wound infections and some new methods for the study of the various factors which come into consideration in their treatment.djvu/22

8 now expel from my capillary tube my first volume of serum—this in passing over the wet wall will take up its charge of microbes—and I receive this as it issues on to a clean slide. I repeat these manipulations with the next lower dilution of pus and the next unit volume of serum, and so on, until I have implanted my series of volumes of serum with my series of bacterial dilutions. At the end I find myself with a series of drops of serum containing graduated charges of microbes, ranged in order upon a slide (fig. 3, slide II); and I have in my hand a pipette which is contaminated up to the point indicated by my fiducial mark. I get rid of this contaminated segment of my capillary stem by resecting this just above the fiducial mark, and I now proceed to draw up into my pipette, separating off by bubbles of air, the whole series of drops of serum, beginning with that implanted with the fewest microbes. After sealing up the distal end of the pipette, and closing the butt end by bringing it down upon a bed of plasticine, the pipette is placed in the incubator. After an interval of six to twenty-four hours it is taken out, and the series of unit volumes are now, for purposes of microscopic examination or culture, expelled from the pipette in the order in which they have been taken up—that is, in succession from the lightest