Hæmatoporphyrinuria and its relations to the source of urobilin / by David Fraser Harris.

  • Fraser-Harris, David Fraser, 1867-1937.
Date:
[1897]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hæmatoporphyrinuria and its relations to the source of urobilin / by David Fraser Harris. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    and thereby reduced to a body resembling the artificial hydro- bilirubin which, absorbed from the intestine, traverses the liver, and so, by the lungs, reaches the arterial stream for the kidney. Against this theory may be urged the following considerations:— 1. In animals with a biliary fistula the urine has urobilin. 2. In Copeman and Winston's case * of human biliary fistula, where the faeces were clay-coloured, the urine contained uro- bilin, on some days in excessive quantity. 3. A body constantly present is made to depend upon a fluctuat- ing quantity like nascent hydrogen. 4. Why, if bilirubin, formed in the liver is at once excreted from it in the bile, should hydrobilirubin pass through the liver un- changed, or pass through it at all into the blood for the right auricle ? 5. In fevers, whereas the amount of bile is diminished, urobilin is increased. The fate of the bile-pigments will still further determine the site of the source of urobilin. The bile-pigments, acted upon in the intestine by some de-oxidising agent either contained in pancreatic juice f or acting in its presence, forms stercobilin, the brown fsecal pigment thus eliminated; for (1) before the pancreas secretes we have meconium (thick foetal bile-pigment unaltered); and (2) although bile be secreted, if the pancreas is diseased or its duct occluded, stercobilin is absent from the faeces; (3) in vigorous catharsis, when bile-pigment is hurried through the intestine, it may be yellow (bilirubin) and not brown (stercobilin). [Recently it has been suggested, from the spectroscopic affinities between stercobilin and pathological urobilin, that the presence of the latter in urine may be due to an abnormal absorption of the former from the bowel.] Unquestionably haemoglobin via haematin (normally) is the parent of both the bile-pigment and the urinary pigment, and it is most probable both are the offspring of haematin of the same generation. Thus, though the biliary origin of urobilin must be given up, there is much to point to its hepatic origin; that the liver is the * Jour, of Phys., x. p. 21. t T. J. Walker, Med.-Chir. Trans., Lond., vol. Ixxii., 1890.