Читать книгу The Body at Work: A Treatise on the Principles of Physiology онлайн

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When the surface of the body is struck, the effect of the blow is marked at first by redness. There is nothing to show that small bloodvessels have been ruptured and blood effused beneath the skin. Next day the injured area is reddish-purple. The bruise turns blue, green, yellow, and eventually disappears. In the process of absorption, oxyhæmoglobin undergoes decomposition. First its proteid constituent is removed, leaving a coloured pigment containing iron, termed “hæmatin”; soon reduced by loss of oxygen to hæmochromogen. When Sir George Stokes first described the spectrum of blood (cf. p. 185), he showed that as hæmoglobin may exist in an oxidized and in a non-oxidized condition, distinguished by their spectra, so also may the coloured residue which is left after the proteid constituent has been removed from hæmoglobin. This coloured residue he termed, when oxidized, “hæmatin”; when not oxidized, “reduced hæmatin.” Stokes’s reduced hæmatin is now termed “hæmochromogen.” Hæmochromogen stands for the coloured nucleus of hæmoglobin. Although it is not present in hæmoglobin as hæmochromogen—hence we must not speak of hæmoglobin as made of a protein, x, plus hæmochromogen, y—it is to its coloured residue that hæmoglobin owes its value as a carrier of oxygen. Later, iron is removed from hæmochromogen, leaving hæmatoidin, a substance often found at the seat of old hæmorrhages, where it may remain unchanged for a very long time. Hæmatoidin is apparently identical with the yellow pigment of bile, bilirubin. The green colour which shows itself in the bruise seems to indicate that the more oxidized bile-pigment, biliverdin, is formed in the first instance. Red corpuscles, when destroyed in the spleen, pass through transformations similar to those which blood undergoes when effused beneath the skin. Their protein is used by the phagocytes which eat them. Their iron is reserved for the use of the blood-forming cells of the red marrow of bone. The pigment which remains as the residue of hæmoglobin is carried by the splenic vein to the liver, which secretes it as bile-pigment. So much of the bile-pigment as is reabsorbed by the wall of the alimentary canal is eventually excreted as the pigment of urine.