Abstract

Your attention is asked for considering the employment of intramuscular injections of citrated blood, as nutriment, in certain cases where the alimentary canal may not be utilized.The introduction of food into the human body, aside from the intestinal tract route, that is, by the parenteral route, has had and still has a very restricted field of application. Other than the use of glucose solutions by the venous, peritoneal and subcutaneous routes, no accepted method or agent suggests itself. Blood transfusion and injections into tissues were associated with their traditional purposes and aims. In anaemia, in hemorrhage, in marasmic states, in blood dyscrasias. Never were they associated in the mind of this reporter with supplying nutrition, pure and simple, notwithstanding the fact, known from student days, that the fetus of all mammalians grows from a single coalesced cell to the size attained at birth on nutriment obtained from the maternal blood through the membrane separating the two blood systems. The possibility implicit in this every-day phenomenon had never suggested itself until the summer of 1915, when a child was placed under my care direfully in need of food and yet unable to take food through the alimentary tract.