Elizabeth Topley

Dohle bodies in the leucocytes of patients with burns.

When working in a hospital for infectious diseases, Dohle (1911, 1912a and b) noticed round, blue-staining bodies in the cytoplasm of neutrophil leucocytes of patients suffering from scarlet fever. As these bodies were occasionally reminiscent of spirochaetes, Dohle first assumed them to be the cause of scarlet fever. This is not surprising if one remembers that only a short time before a spirochaete had been discovered as the cause of syphilis. However, the same bodies, which came to be known as Dohle bodies, were observed also in erysipelas (Kolmer, 1912; MacEwen, 1913-14), in diphtheria on about the third day (Kolmer, 1912), in typhus (MacEwen, 1913-14; Rehder, 1942), and possibly in tuberculosis (Bachman and Lucke, 1918). In measles Kolmer (1912) found them absent, while MacEwen (1913-14)-considered their presence in 12 out of 35 cases as possibly associated with oral sepsis. Dohle bodies were

Local dibrompropamidine in the treatment of burns

CLAIMS for the value of local dibrompropamidine in burns and wounds have been put forward by several writers (Kohn and Cross, 1948 ; Arden, 1949 and 1954; Champion and McDowall, 1949). Our experience with the compound (see Bull et al., 1948 ; Lowbury et al., 1952) and the report of its toxic action on leucocytes by Wien et al. (1948) led us to abandon its use in favour of other agents which were found to be safer and also more effective (Jackson et al., 1951 a, b). We report below four groups of observations in support of our opinion that dibrompropamidine is unsuitable as a routine application for burns.