Volume 2

The internal secretions and the principles of medicine / by Charles E. de M. Sajous.

  • Sajous, Charles E. de M. (Charles Eucharist de Medicis), 1852-1929.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The internal secretions and the principles of medicine / by Charles E. de M. Sajous. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    evident counterpart of the functions of leucocytes in the high¬ est vertebrates, as emphasized in the foregoing pages. The correspondence between so lowly an animal as the sponge and the highest representatives of the zoological scale is not invalidated by the fact that the former lives in the seas while the latter include a vast number that lead a purely ter¬ restrial existence. Forty years ago, Claude Bernard89 taught that the blood of vertebrates represented “an internal medium in which anatomical elements live as do fishes in water.” In¬ deed, man has not severed his connection with the Oceans in which lived the primitive cells from which he sprang; his blood, we shall see,90 closely approximates sea-water in composition: he merely carries, therefore, a bit of the Ocean within him. But we must not overlook the difference between a free mobile, unicellular organism, the amoeba, for instance, and a cell de¬ prived of migratory motions such as the tissue-cell. The one is able to provide itself with sufficient food, not only because it can reach for it with its pseudopodia, but also because it can, by migrating, increase, when necessary and conditions permit¬ ting, its food-supply. The sedentary tissue-cell, imprisoned among its kind, cannot thus satisfy its needs, and Nature meets the want by providing both an amoeboid messenger, the leucocyte, and the precise food the tissues need, the granule. Summarized, this evidence, supplemented by that contained in the preceding section and in the first volume, appears to me to warrant the following conclusions: (1) that the tissue-cells are not nourished as now taught, by peptones carried to them by the blood-plasma; (2) that this function is carried on by leuco¬ cytes which migrate through the walls of the capillaries with the blood-plasma, to enter the spaces between the tissue-cells; (3) that once in the intercellular spaces the leucocytes secrete their granulations; (4) that these granulations are the nutri¬ tive materials of the tissue-cells; (5) that the granulations penetrate the tissue-cells from the periphery and constitute their granules or microsomes. 89 Claude Bernard: Lecons sur les proprieties des tissus vivants,” p. 55, Paris, 1866. 90 Cf. this vol., 1367.