Lymphatic Protection

Last week, frankly astonished by his findings, Dean Cecil Kent Drinker of Harvard's School of Public Health went to Chicago to give a convention of the American College of Surgeons his explanation of the functioning of the lymphatic system.

While studying the lymphatic system. a festoon of glands and channels which drains all the tissues of the body and parallels the blood system, Dr. Drinker observed that inflammation in a wound blocks the lymph channels in that part of the body. This blockade does two things. It causes substances, whose constituents Dr. Drinker confessed he does not know, to accumulate in the wound. These substances cause scars. The blockade also prevents the free flow of lymph to the site of the wound. Lymph, in some manner which Dr. Drinker still is trying to learn, destroys germs. If, as in an inflamed wound, it cannot reach invading germs the instant they touch the raw flesh, the germs swiftly get into the blood stream where the lymph can do no good and the blood serum must perform all the germicidal work by itself.

"This analysis of lymph function," concluded astonished Dr. Drinker, "leaves us with the idea that the lymphatic system is organized solely as a bulwark against the natural development of tissue abnormality and against infection."

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