The Manganese-Copper-Iron Complex as a Factor in Hemoglobin Building

In an earlier paper Titus and Cave (1) presented data showing that manganese is effective in hemoglobin building in the nutritional type of anemia when the rabbit was used as the experimental animal.Hart and coworkers (2) presented data to the effect that copper is a factor in the building of hemoglobin when the rat was used as the experimental animal.Previous to this report these same investigators (3) showed that high purity iron salts when fed at 0.5 mg.levels to rats were ineffective in correcting a nutritional type of anemia brought about by feeding a diet of cow's whole milk.Our attention was directed toward a study of manganese when rabbits, which had been fed for some time a corrective diet containing Fez03 of "analyzed" purity, continued to grow and failed to become anemic as we had expected.About this time Professor E. B. Hart of the University. of Wisconsin very kindly sent one of us a small amount of Fez03 which he had found to be ineffect,ive in preventing this nutritional type of anemia.Feeding this oxide of iron to our rabbits confirmed his experience in this respect, as our rabbits rapidly became anemic.We began to make comparisons between these two samples of Fez03 and found, among other things, that the "analyzed" sample of Fez03 contained about 4 times as much manganese as the sample which we received from Professor Hart.We also investigated the lettuce ash and found it to be quite high in manganese.The bluish green color which appeared