Abstract
The following investigation was undertaken in order to study the effects of the repeated intravenous injection of India ink upon the blood picture in rabbits.
Higgins' waterproof India ink was used. It was filtered and suspended in physiological salt solution in the proportion of one part of ink to three parts of salt solution. The suspensions were sterilized before each injection. With few exceptions, ten cubic centimeters of the ink suspension were injected into the ear veins of the rabbits, at intervals of forty-eight hours. The number of injections varied between seventeen and fifty-six. The rabbits weighed between two and one-half and three kilos.
The following constituents of the blood were studied: erythrocytes, hemoglobin, leucocytes and reticulated cells. Examinations were made immediately preceding injections. Similar examinations were made on a series of normal control rabbits kept under the same conditions.
In all the rabbits, as a result of the injections, there was a gradual fall in the number of erythrocytes, which at the lowest levels was forty to fifty per cent of the original count. Following this drop, in spite of continued injections, there was a rise in the erythrocyte count which reached approximately normal values at about the twentieth injection.
Determinations of hemoglobin were made with the Newcomer apparatus, using daylight as the source of illumination. The values obtained with this apparatus are only relative, but they tended to follow the fluctuations in erythrocyte counts except in one rabbit, in which the fluctuations were less pronounced than those of the other three rabbits.
Normoblasts were usually observed in every smear. The normoblasts became more numerous as the number of injections increased and hemacytoblasts appeared.
The reticulated cells were moderately increased during the period of the anemia, but the count remained within normal limits during the period of recovery.
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