February 15, 2019 Friday
Bedtime Story
The Basis of Four Humors
Because the blood is a colloid and we now
know the properties of colloid it is not surprising then that the normal
sedimentation rate of a newborn is just 0 to 2 mm per hour which gradually
rises over the age as we grow older.
But it is during inflammatory assault on
the organism when the liver starts pumping in fibrinogen into the blood the
balance tilts dramatically in the favor of sedimentation of erythrocytes.
The erythrocytes began to first get stacked
over each other and then due to the action of gravity begin to sediment.
Eventually the cells begin to pack at the
bottom of the test tube.
So now you have a scientific understanding
of why the ESR gets elevated when you get infections.
It is this ESR which has a bearing on our
story on the Hippocratic theory of humorism that lasted for almost 20
centuries.
A Swedish physician by the name of Dr.
Robert Fahraeus studied standing blood in test tubes and would watch it
coagulate.
He noticed that the blood that coagulated
in a test tube if left for long enough period would segregate itself into four
layers.
In the blood thus left to coagulate the
bottommost layer tends to be deep and dark red due to the blood clot being
heavy and settling at the bottom.
The second layer from bottom Dr. Fahraeus
noticed would be red composed of erythrocytes that has gravitated down but not
clotted with fibrin.
The layer above it would be pale and
whitish and now we know it is so because it is composed of mainly white blood
cells.
In modern medicine this layer is known as
the buffy coat (buff is the pale orange-brown color of the undyed leather of
animals) which is the thin layer that is formed when a sample of
anti-coagulated mammalian blood is centrifuged.
This buffy coat layer is extremely thin in
comparison to the other layers forming less than 1% of the thickness of the entire
sample column.
Can you guess why this layer is so thin?
Buffy layer is composed of white blood
cells and platelets.
White blood cells that are our own personal
and personalized army against enemy invaders who all the time are looking for
opportunities to invade and infect or infest us constitute a mere 1% of the
total blood volume of a healthy adult.
This is in contrast to red blood cells
which constitute almost 45% of the total blood volume.
This means even our own body does not
invests very highly on its defense mechanisms or at least does it very
economically.
White blood cells actually got their name
from the whitish color of this thin layer that is obtained post centrifugation
of anti-coagulated blood.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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