Studies in isoagglutination. III. Tonicity in isohemagglutination / by Morris H. Kahn and Reuben Ottenberg.

  • Kahn, Morris H.
Date:
[1911]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Studies in isoagglutination. III. Tonicity in isohemagglutination / by Morris H. Kahn and Reuben Ottenberg. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    other corpuscles, and that definite tonicity groups exist correspond- ing to agglutination groups. He suggested that, as sera are assumed to be of the same tonicity as the contents of the red cells,2 the dif- ferences in tonicity might be the cause of the agglutinations. The hypertonicity of sera belonging to the first group would explain their power of agglutinating cells of the other groups. The hypertonicity of the serum of one of the agglutinable groups would explain its agglutination of the cells of the other group. But, as Ga\ himself points out, it would not explain the reverse interaction between the groups, which also occurs. Agglutination groupings are permanent for the individual. They are hereditary. Isoagglutinative serum is active at a considerable dilution generally up to about I in 32—with ordinary physiolog- ical saline solution. The resistance of human red cells is known to vary widely in disease and under special conditions, such as follow the ingestion of salts (Sutherland and McCay). These important facts led us to doubt whether so simple an explanation as Gay offers can account for the phenomena. We therefore determined to reex- amine the subject and repeat Gay’s experiments. The technique which we followed was practically identical with that of Gay. With a clean, dry, hollow needle, fifteen to twenty cubic centimeters of blood were obtained from an arm vein and defibrinated by a few glass beads in a perfectly clean bottle. (Gay used a rod instead of beads, and obtained a somewhat larger amount of blood.) After the cells had sedimented during six hours in an ice box, all the supernatant clear serum was pipetted off and the sedimented cells were used for the tonicity tests. Bloods of which the serum showed any trace of laking were discarded. It is not necessary to describe here again the well-known method of making the agglutination tests and of arranging the bloods in their correct groups. The resistance of the red blood cells was tested by Hamburger’s method, as used by Gay. A series of salt solutions ranging in con- centration from 0.38 per cent, to 0.57 per cent, of sodium chlorid was prepared. In the first experiments, the difference between the ‘This assumption is not entirely warranted, as the work of Theobald Smith and others has shown.