[a. F. bile, ad. L. bīlis.]
1. The fluid secreted by the liver, and poured into the duodenum, as an aid to the digestive process. It is bitter, of a brownish yellow color, passing sometimes into green, and of a highly complex structure. (It was one of the ‘four humours’ of early physiology, and was, till the beginning of the 18th c., commonly termed choler.)
1665. G. Thomson, Med. Ignor., 147. Blood, Bile, Phlegme, and Melancholy.
1700. Dryden, Cock & Fox, 147. These foolish Fancies … Are certain Symptoms … Of boiling Choler, and abounding Bile.
1732. Arbuthnot, Rules of Diet, 267. Livers of Animals, because of the Bile which they contain.
1810. Henry, Elem. Chem. (1826), II. 441.
1861. Hulme, trans. Moquin-Tandon, II. III. iii. 95. Bile … is secreted by the liver, and is received into a special receptacle termed the gall-bladder.
b. Excess or derangement of the bile.
1803. Pitt, in G. Rose, Diaries (1860), II. 10. I am … quite free both from gout and bile.
1836. Marryat, Midsh. Easy, viii. His bile was raised by this parade and display in a lad.
1838. Hallam, Hist. Lit., I. I. iv. § 45. 289. After all this bile against those whom the royal bird represents.
3. Black Bile = atrabilis, choler adust, or melancholy, the fourth of the ‘humours’ of early physiology; see ATRABILE.
1797. Godwin, Enquirer, I. x. 88. He had been … accumulating … black bile.
4. Comb. and Attrib., as bile-cell, -cyst, -duct, etc.; bile-pigment, one of the coloring substances of bile; bile-stone, a calculus formed in the gall-bladder, a gall-stone.
1674. Grew, Anat. Trunks, III. ii. § 17. In the Liver, it were hard to say, which is a Blood-Vessel, and which is a Bile-Vessel … if it were not for the Contents of them both.
1774. E. Darwin, in Phil. Trans., 346. The bile-duct was tied before it was taken out of the body. Ibid. (1796), Zool., II. 4. Where these bile-stones are too large to pass.
1880. J. W. Legg, Bile, 87. In health no bile-pigment can be detected in the blood.
