ACTION OF THE BILE IN DIGESTION. 361 



this is the view entertained by some experimentalists, more 

 especially Blondlot. In this position of the subject, natu- 

 rally the first question to decide is concerning the excremen- 

 titious or recrementitious character of the bile ; or whether, 

 in other words, it is separated from the blood simply to be 

 discharged from the body, or has some important function to 

 perform as a secretion. 



An apparently simple method of settling this question 

 has been employed by many experimenters, but with results 

 which are not satisfactory unless they can be in some way 

 harmonized. Schwann, Nasse, Bidder and Schmidt, and 

 Bernard, whose observations will be more fully considered 

 hereafter, have performed experiments upon animals in 

 which the bile was entirely shut off from the intestine and 

 discharged from the body by a fistula. If the bile be simply 

 excrementitious, it should follow that animals operated upon 

 in this way would not suffer from the discharge of the bile 

 by a fistula and its diversion from the intestine ; but in all 

 of them, death occurred with symptoms pointing to defective 

 nutrition consequent upon grave disorder of digestion. The 

 same result followed our own experiments on this subject. 

 On the other hand, Blondlot attempts to show that the bile 

 is simply an excretion, and that animals thrive and will live 

 for an indefinite period when it, is diverted from its natural 

 course and discharged from the body. 



In the experiments of Blundell, Brodie, and others, who 

 simply closed the ductus communis choledicus, the effects of 

 shutting off the bile from the intestine were modified by the 

 consequent undue accumulation of this fluid in the biliary 

 passages. The only way to obviate this difficulty was to dis- 

 charge the bile by a fistula, as was first done by Schwann. 

 The first experiments reported by Schwann were made upon 

 sixteen dogs and one rabbit. Of these, only six can be re- 

 garded as successful ; and in the others, the animals either 

 died of peritonitis resulting from the operation, or recovered, 

 the fistulous opening into the gall-bladder becoming closed 



