Factors Influencing the Blood Picture of the Newborn

MANY WRITERS have noted the lack of standard values for the number of red corpuscles, amounts of hemoglobin and percentage of packed corpuscles in the blood of the newborn infant. The literature on this subject has been well reviewed by Smith in his recent book on "Physiology of the Newborn Infant."1He has discussed the uncontrolled factors which may have led to the wide range of values encountered. We have reported the effect on the blood picture of depriving the infant of placental blood during the first week of life.2We found that hastily clamping the umbilical cord immediately after birth led to significantly lower red corpuscle counts and hemoglobin contents of the blood during the first week of life. Infants whose cords were not clamped until the placentas had separated from the uteri had on the average 560,000 more red blood corpuscles per cubic millimeter and 2.6