Phenomena of blood coagulation with special reference to a transplanted tumor of the rabbit.

Abstract

A certain proportion of rabbits, about 20 per cent, inoculated with the tumor now employed in our work 1 develop a fulminating malignant disease and die with widespread metatases as early as 3 to 5 weeks after inoculation. When these animals are examined at autopsy it is frequently noticed that the blood retained in the heart or in contact with raw surfaces may show little or no tendency to the formation of a firm clot. The contrast between this behavior and the apparently normal formation of blood clots in rabbits of the same group, which develop a more benign form of disease, led to the following quantitative study of the phenomena of blood coagulation in tumor bearing rabbits as a possible factor of importance in determining the course of malignant disease.

It was deemed advisable in beginning this investigation, to approach the problem first from the standpoint of the gross prenomenon of coagulation, separating this into two components, clotting time and clot contractibility. In the measurement of the so-called clotting time, the many methods thus far elaborated take as an endpoint the attainment of a certain consistency of clot in its resistance to one force or another. This necessarily confuses the idea of time per se of the initiation of coagulation with that of the firmness or contractibility of the clot and rules out all such methods for the present purpose. It was necessary, therefore, to devise methods and instruments for the investigation of this problem. The details of the methods employed and the description of the instruments used will be reported elsewhere.

For the present, it is sufficient to say that an instrument was devised which made it possible to observe the earliest gross precipitation of fibrin in a thin film of blood.