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

  • Fraser-Harris, David Fraser, 1867-1937.
Date:
[1898]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hæmatoporphyminuria 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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    former the band to the right of D is much fainter than the homologous band of the latter. The patient was a young Highland fisherman (at. 25), who had suffered for several years from an annual eruption (from April to October) of a vesicular type. Ten to twelve hours before the formation of the blisters there was intolerable itch- ing, but he had no headache nor malaise. The blood showed no diminution in the number of corpuscles; the hemoglobin, how- ever (with Gower's instrument), appeared to be only 60 per cent, of normal; spectroscopically, it yielded no bands beyond the two of Hb02. Beyond all doubt, haemoglobin, through its pigmentary element the haematin, is the parent of the pigments of the bile, and the chief pigment of the urine (urobilin)—(indican and other allied pigments being derived from an aromatic molecule, phenol and its substitution-compounds, originally resident in proteid mate- rial metabolised in pancreatic digestion). Hasmatin—an iron- containing substance—is the source, on the one hand, of bilirubin or biliverdin, iron-free pigments; and on the other, of urobilin, also an iron-free pigment; but in what manner, as to parent- age, are these pigments of the bile and urine related to each other ? Are they members of the same generation, or is the bilirubin the progenitor of urobilin ? The former supposition seems to be more in accordance with facts, though certain of the text-books will be found to dismiss the subject by uphold- ing an old view, which, stated more in detail, is, that the bile- pigment in the intestine is acted upon by nascent hydrogen there, and that a reduction-product (considered by Maly iden- tical with hydro-bilirubin, formed by the action of sodium amalgam on bilirubin) is thereby produced, that this is absorbed into the portal system, passes through the liver without (apparently) undergoing any change or being excreted into the bile, is sent on to the right side of the heart, and so, via the lungs, into the arterial stream from which the kidney removes it as urobilin. Before giving reasons for adopting the view that the bile- pigment and the urine-pigment are derivatives of hasmatin of equal remoteness from it, and are not derived the one from the other, we might point out the unlikely nature of the hypothetical