New Coagulant

Last week Chemists Arthur Steinberg & William Redman Brown of Philadelphia's Kensington Hospital for Women proudly set out for Toronto to tell the American Physiological Society about their amazing new discovery: oxalic acid for rapid coagulation of blood. But when the young chemists got to Toronto, they were scientifically hissed & booed. Reason: oxalic acid, a common cleaning fluid and ink remover, is used by physicians in a derivative form to prevent coagulation of blood for transfusions. It was impossible, said the scoffing physiologists for an anticoagulant to produce coagulation.

Undaunted, Drs. Steinberg & Brown invited the meeting to the University of Toronto laboratories where they bled a rabbit. Without oxalic acid the rabbit's blood coagulated in two minutes, 29 seconds. With oxalic acid, the blood coagulated in one minute, 29 seconds. But still the skeptical scientists claimed that oxalic acid was poisonous. Dr. Brown promptly rolled up his sleeve, displayed an arm pockmarked from hundreds of injections, brandished a hypodermic needle. When no one volunteered to give him an injection of the acid, he gave himself a standard dose, thus convinced his timid colleagues that the acid was harmless. What he was unable to say, however, was why pure oxalic acid produced the opposite effect of the derivative form.

Several years ago Drs. Steinberg & Brown learned that oxalic acid is present in small quantities in normal blood. In the last three years they have injected standard, three-milligram doses of oxalic acid into the veins of almost 1,000 persons who suffered from excessive bleeding due to such varied conditions as hemophilia, gastric ulcers, childbirth, jaundice and kidney and lung infections. In every case bleeding stopped within five minutes, the normal coagulating time, even though the patients had been bleeding as long as two hours. In many cases bleeding ceased within 45 seconds of injection. Oxalic acid thus appeared likely to supplant snake venom, sterol (solid alcohol) and other makeshift coagulants, likely to save thousands of lives every year.

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