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.

    9/14 (page 7)
    contents disappeared, and both in look and smell they re- sembled dog’s ordinary faeces. After standing the per- chloride of mercury yielded the bright green of biliverdin in the upper and lower thirds of the small intestine, where the yellow colour of bilirubin was originally found, but no green coloration was obtained in the middle third. Just below the ileo-caecal valve the contents of the intestine gave with perch- loride of mercury a marked urobilin reaction, and this con- tinued to be the case as far down as the rectum. No colour reaction could be obtained in any part of the wall of the small intestine. The dog now referred to had been fed on biscuit alone, with a little meat some twelve hours previously. In the case in which the dogs were fed solely on meat, the colour met with in the middle third of the small intestines was more grey than white, and haematin could be chemically recognised in it. The same remark likewise holds good for cats. In neither the normal dog nor cat have I been able to ob- tain in the intestinal contents much above the caecum any urobilin, and when examined while in a fresh condition the walls of the small intestines throughout showed no staining with urobilin whatever. In a monkey I examined I found the same changes occur as I found in man. The urobilin was found present in the in- testinal contents from below the caecum to the anus, but there was no trace of a pink coloration in the walls of the caecum, colon, or rectum. The results obtained in the foregoing experiments led me to investigate the formation of urobilin in two dogs from which the large intestine and caecum had been removed four months previously. The small intestine having been arti- ficially joined to the rectum, at the post-mortem examination the junction was found to be in one of the dogs (A.) 4 centi- metres, and in another (B.) 6 centimetres above the anus. Both of these dogs, in spite of their having neither large intestine nor caecum during the latter months, partook heartily of a mixed diet of meat and biscuits, and appeared in the best of health. The bile and urobilin in the faeces was examined by the method of Gerhardt.7 The sulphates were estimated by Baumann’s and tlie nitrogen by Kjeldalil’s method. 7U. Gcrliardt, Uebcr Hydrobilirubin'und seine Beziehungen zum Ikterus, Inaug. Dus., Berlin, 1889.