Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [111]
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*65Strangely, blood was not the liquid of choice during other early attempts at transfusion. According to the American Red Cross, ale, wine, and milk were used. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, physicians injected patients with milk to treat cholera, believing that the “white corpuscles of milk” would convert into the red corpuscles of blood. This wasn’t as strange an idea as it might sound, since there are many similarities between the two liquids.
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†66 Landsteiner won the Nobel Prize for his work in 1930.
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*67In his book Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce, Douglas Starr hypothesized that early transfusion recipient Antoine Mauroy actually suffered from an advanced stage of syphilis (which is caused by the bacterium Traponema pallidum ). Starr suggested that Mauroy’s early positive results might have occurred after a transfusion-induced fever killed off the heat-sensitive pathogens for a while.
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*68In this technique, a glass cup was inverted over a flame, heating the air within. The cup was then placed flush against the patient’s skin, and when the air within it cooled, a vacuum formed, which was believed to draw out toxins from the body.
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*69Mechanoreceptors are specialized sensory structures that are stimulated by physical contact (just like chemoreceptors are stimulated by chemicals).
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*70To put the diversity of the Hirudinea and its 650 members into perspective, there are roughly five thousand species in the class Mammalia and about thirty thousand species of bony fishes in the class Osteichthyes. Whenever we vertebrate biologists get too pumped up over the vast number of animals we have to study, it’s often sobering to check out the invertebrate class Insecta. This group wins the Animal Diversity Contest hands-down, with estimates of well over one million living species, including over three hundred thousand species of beetles!
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*71One Trinidadian genus (Lumbricobdella) has reverted to the burrowing lifestyle of its ancestors. Not surprisingly, this leech has lost its caudal sucker and moves through the soft ground much as an earthworm does.
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*72Those readers interested in learning more about leeches (a lot more, actually) should consult Roy T. Sawyer’s 1986 three-volume magnum opus Leech Biology and Behavior.
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*73According to American Museum of Natural History leech expert Mark Siddall, the leeches being cultivated today at places like Leeches USA aren’t really Hirudo medicinalis but Hirudo verbana (a species that isn’t protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species or approved for use as a medical instrument by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration). Just as important, it appears that wild leeches, from across Europe, comprise three separate species, creating at least the potential for three times as many anticlotting compounds. Rudy Rosenberg said that if the new classification is accepted he will petition to extend its approval to Hirudo verbana.
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*74Like many freshwater leeches, Hirudo is most active in cold water (around 42–45°F, or 5–7°C). Presumably, this is when their aquatic prey are sluggish or inactive and therefore easily attacked. Many leech species become stressed out in warm water, probably owing to a decrease in dissolved oxygen. In some freshwater species that prey on fish, a rapid increase in water temperature coincides with a detachment from their prey, whereupon the leeches reproduce and die.
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*75Whalebone is the layman’s term for baleen, which isn’t bone at all. Baleen is composed of the waterproof protein keratin and grows in plates in the mouths of filter-feeding whales (like the blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus ). Biochemically identical to hair, baleen tends to curl or frizz in humid air, while straightening out in dry air. This property may or