INFLUENCE OF SOME DRUGS AND OF EMOTIONS ON BLOOD COAGULATION

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Abstract
In a paper read at a meeting of the American Medical Association at Atlantic City on June 11, 1942, before the Section on Pathology and Physiology, I announced a pharmacologic discovery which in the subsequent years has been followed by developments of clinical importance.1 I reported that when repeated samples of blood are taken from cats during the progress of intravenous injections of digitalis or ouabain solutions for biological assay, the coagulation time of the blood samples as determined by the Lee and White method progressively became shorter. This phenomenon did not occur in control experiments with many other drugs. The same phenomenon of marked decrease in coagulation time was noted again in experiments with digitalis on rabbits in which the blood samples were obtained by cardiac punctures. These findings in regard to digitalis and ouabain were found to hold good also for strophanthus, Convallaria, and other digitaloid drugs,