Health of Premature Children from Birth to Four Years

THE SURGEON AND ISCHAEMIA MEDICJOURn and mitigate the severity of those which do occur, by by- passing the morphological issue and, as an expedient, raising to prophylactic levels the amount of anticoagulant substance derived from humoral sources normally circulating in the blood. At the present time this is possible experimentally: when introduced into the portal circulation, curare increases the output of heparin from the liver.-Unfortunately, even if a suitable pharmacological preparation were available, therapy of this kind would need to be continuous, for we do not know whether a tendency to clotting-" pre-clotting " -precedes episodes of thrombosis by a long period or a short one. Moreover, investigation along such lines might not commend itself, because on occasion clotting is a valu- able protective mechanism, and to suggest its abolition transgresses a clinical precept which is usually sound enough-that one must never try to correct one pathological process by substituting another; although in this particular problem I should not subscribe to that view.