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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    usually active blood-katabolism going on, which is evidenced not only by the elevated temperature, but by the increased amount of urinary pigment appearing. The muscles un- doubtedly are the seat, in many fevers, of this excessive katabolism, part of the expression of which is the increased destruction of hsematin owing to the exaltation of the normal tissue-avidity for oxygen, with the subsequent appearance either of an excessive amount of a haematin-derived pigment (urobilin), or, by reason of the very vigour of the metabolism, an unusually de-oxidised form of it,—Pathological Urobilin. M'Munn, in his chart accompanying the paper On the origin of Uro-haematoporphyrin and of Normal and Pathological Urobilin in the organism,1 shows that urobilin must be regarded as more fully oxidised than Pathological Urobilin, and than stercobilin if its hepatic origin and identity with Pathological Urobilin be believed in. We have further evidence that other tissues than the hepatic katabolise hsematin,—extravasations of blood under the skin or fasciae usually give rise to an increase of urobilin, and we know that in these clots haematoidin, an iron-free though crystalline pigment, is produced. The chief other tissues or 'systems' which could by any possibility be sufficiently extensive seats of this metabolism are (1) the muscular, (2) the cutaneous, and (3) the connective-tissue, articular and skeletal. The blood which reaches the kidney .is entirely arterial, being a portion of the main aortic stream which has passed through the lungs, having been collected from very different sources and mixed in the right auricle. Now, from a chemical point of view, the blood of the right side of the heart may be viewed as having proceeded from precisely these two main sources— (I.) the liver, (II.) from the systems (1), (2), and (3), as above indicated (to which, no doubt, the venous blood of the head has to be added). The bloods from both (I.) and (II.), which may be for physio- logico-chemical purposes thought of as distinct, pass through the lungs, where oxidation is the pre-eminent process, and thereafter are distributed to all parts of the body where de-oxidations are equally characteristic.