Page:Wound infections and some new methods for the study of the various factors which come into consideration in their treatment.djvu/41

Rh The line of thought which I have followed in elaborating a laboratory method for the study of the phenomena of emigration is the following: The leucocytes in extravascular blood are known to retain their emigrating power. A difficulty, however, when we are working with extravascular blood, will beset our observations, inasmuch as we have not at disposal such a containing membrane as the capillary wall. We are, in fact, in dealing with extravascular blood, confronted with a situation similar to that which would be encountered in observations in vivo if the capillary walls were to give way and we had to make observations on emigration in a portion of tissue which was flooded out by red corpuscles.

I had hoped at first to be able to circumvent this difficulty by taking advantage of the fact that when clotting occurs the red blood corpuscles become enclosed in a meshwork of fibrin, after the manner of fish in a net. But all my efforts to make the fibrin meshwork take over the office of a containing membrane were defeated. No matter how tenderly the clot was treated the meshes of the net broke, and haemorrhage from the clot interfered with the observations.

A second difficulty also presented itself. When in the living body white corpuscles emigrate into