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Visible proof of this is found in seals. They shiver severely after a dive—because they have lost heat in their extremities from lack of circulation. The universality of the phenomenon is demonstrated by the converse in fish: if these normally submerged animals are taken out of the water, they behave very much like land animals that have been put into water. Their hearts slow down, along with the circulation to their extremities.
Measure of Danger. One link between all these esoteric facts and human medicine is that the human fetus spends nine months in a fluid world, "breathing" through its mother's blood, then is catapulted into an air-breathing world. Dr. L. Stanley James, of Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, has tested newborn babies' blood. It contains chemicals showing that muscles were burning up starch and turning it into lactic acid during birth. If a birth takes unusually long, the concentration of lactic acid increases; it is a measure of how severely the baby's life has been threatened by oxygen starvation.
Dr. Scholander's line of research has already solved a long-standing mystery:Why do victims of heart attacks sometimes develop gangrenous spots in their intestines? Because the heart, brain and lungs demand and get all the blood available in a crisis, they deprive the intestine of blood circulation, and gangrene may result, especially if the intestinal circulation was previously impaired.