Formation of urobilin / by Vaughan Harley.

  • Harley, Vaughan.
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Formation of urobilin / by Vaughan Harley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    of adults as Schmidt would lead one to suppose from what he obtained in the case of children. I found it to be veiy excep- tional to find any urobilin coloration in the contents above the ileo-caecal valve. Another interesting fact I noted which Schmidt drew no attention to is that the green or yellow colour due to the staining of the contents by bile in the duodenum and upper third of the jejunum tends to disappear about the middle third of the small intestine, where the contents become of a more or less greyish white; the green colour reappearing in the lower third of the small intestine as the contents of the ileum are always more or less coloured green with a slight tinge of brown. It would appear as if the bile in its passage along the intestinal canal is converted in the middle third of the small intestine into some colourless chromogen, to be reconverted into coloured bile lower down. For orfe can hardly suppose that all the bile pigment is absorbed from the upper part of the intestines in order to be re-excreted from the blood into the lower third of the small intestine.6 The urobilin coloration is only obtained when one reaches below the point in which the bilirubin has reappeared. A great part of the urobilin present in the intestinal contents is probably in the form of the chromogen urobilinogen, for from the results of analysis I find that larger quantities of urobilin are always to be obtained in the intestinal contents after they have stood a little while. This does not, however, entirely support the chromogen view of the case, as during the stand- ing process after removal from the body the bacteria have a longer time to convert more bile pigment into urobilin. In the case of a 12 days old child I had the opportunity of examining, through the kindness of Mr. Curtis, there was neither in the contents nor in the walls any nrobilin obtain- able. This result agrees with that of Schmidt, who could get no reaction in the case of a 5 days old child. Muller found no urobilin in the urine of newborn children, and none appeared in either the faeces or the urine until three days after birth. In the case of the 12 days old child above mentioned, the descending colon, sigmoid flexure, and rectum contained only a little colourless mucus, and the caecum some greyish mucus but no urobilin. The upper part 8 Tlii= colour change is not present in all cases and is, as a rule, most marked in dogs.