Abstract
It is known that percentages of serum Ca and P are not noticeably altered in human leprosy except in unusual cases or during the lepra reaction. In order to discover the changes, if any, in the lesions themselves a histospectrographic investigation was made of skin lesions obtained from Dr. O. E. Denney at the U. S. Marine Hospital, Carville, La. It was found 1 that the P/Ca ratios in the 5 cases studied were probably 3 times those in normal skins from the same age group. A fair correlation was obtained for the P/Ca ratios with known duration of the disease and volume of leprous cells in the tissues analyzed spectroscopically. The change from the normal may be conditioned by increase in P, decrease in Ca, but probably by both. Perhaps an increase in P may have been occasioned by the tremendous number of bacilli in the lesions. No notable deviations from normal were noted in the Na/Ca, Mg/CA and Fe/Ca ratios.
In the hope of relating these observations on mineral constituents more definitely to cells and groups of cells, the technic of microincineration 2 was applied to sections of human leprous nodules also secured from Carville. We found that the lepra cells showed a finely divided white ash, tending in some places to be slightly bluish and something like that observed in cancer cells. 3 However, we were not successful in differentiating the ash resulting from the bacilli on the one hand and from the cells containing them on the other.
Consequently we shifted the attack to sections of rat leprosy nodules with which it was obviously more easy to experiment in our laboratory. The strain of organisms was received from Dr. E. L. Walker, 12/11/34.
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