The distribution of water added to blood between the corpuscles and the serum.

Abstract

There seems to be uniformity among those who have tried that distilled water injected intravenously or subcutaneously does not act as a diuretic. While the water content of the whole blood or the hemoglobin percentage has been followed the actual water content of the plasma does not seem to have been determined. Owing to the large percentage of solid in red corpuscles it seemed possible that these cells might take up considerable water if the conditions of equilibria were upset. In this paper reference will be made only to experiments done in vitro. Two methods were followed. In the first, various amounts of water were added to samples of the same defibrinated blood, and after standing, the various samples were centrifuged and the water estimated in the different sera by weighing. In the second method the defibrinated blood was centrifuged and the serum and corpuscles separated. Portions of the serum were diluted with definite amounts of distilled water and then equal volumes of the centrifuged corpuscles and various sera were mixed and allowed to stand for a couple of hours. The results show that if the amount of water added to the blood is not sufficient to cause perceptible laking, far more of the water enters the corpuscles than would be expected from purely osmotic considerations. In some of our experiments all of the water added to the blood had entered the corpuscles. An example of this is given below.

Ox defibrinated blood. Original serum had 91.5 per cent water. Dilutions made by taking 14, 13, 12 and 11 cc. of this serum and adding water to make up to 15 cc. 10 cc. of corpuscles mixed with 10 cc. of the sera.