Transfusion of human blood Author:Joseph Roussel Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: apparatus; then close first the afferent and then the efferent branch tube, after all the water and the blood mixed with the water have been ejected. Now, while ... more »the blood is flowing from the one animal to the other, the surgeon, to prevent engorgement of the heart and lungs of the recipient, should take the tube by the middle, compress and relax it regularly each second so as to produce rhythmical jets, suspending the current of the blood from the emittent, and diminishing its violence; in this manner by the pulsation of the tube it may be ascertained that the blood is really being transfused. By this method may be managed an excellent transfusion, but it is not possible to estimate exactly the quantity of blood which has been transfused, it can only be guessed at by the number of minutes which elapse. Direct Venoso-venous Transfusion.—I prefer even in the case of animals to practise transfusion from one vein to the other, a method which allows of very exact calculation of the quantity of blood transfused, and may be repeated frequently without causing so much harm to the animal as is induced by ligaturing arteries and mixing arterial and venous blood. The earlier operators perfectly understood, even in the year 1653, what some moderns still dispute, viz. that venous blood, whatever may be the apparent force with which it spurts at the first moment from a small puncture made in a large well-filled vein, as in ordinaryvenesection; has not the necessary impetus to overcome the resistance and friction of the anaemic circulatory system. It is therefore absolutely necessary to propel the blood by an external force, which can compensate for that action of the heart which was sufficient in arterial transfusion. Dom Eobert des Gabets made an instrument of a tube furnished with...« less