Seriously. This is not a joke.
It has nothing to do with sex, so get your mind out of the gutter. It’s not Alan Sherman’s humdinger.
They call it the Mesentery, and it’s a collection of tissues in the stomach that were for a long time thought to be “fragmented parts”, but is now held to be a complete, connected unit. They’re still not sure what it does:
This part surprised me:
Why they later thought this was a “broken-up” organ isn’t clear. I’m amazed that daVinci had the insight to see it as a connected organ. I’m also impressed that his drawing makes it look as if we all have vulvae in our bellies. (There’s a copy of his drawing in the article.)
I thought it was funny to see a newscast emphasizing the word “mesentery” like it was a new and exotic label. Does nobody dissect animals in middle/high school biology classes any more? If you do, you should be familiar not only with the term, but with the organ itself. It is the series of membranes that link all of the folds of the intestines into a single mass (and makes all of the book/movie scenes of intestines falling out like a tangled fire hose when anyone/anything is gutted completely inaccurate.) The membrane has been called the “mesentery” since long before I leaned the name in high school in the late 1980’s–the only difference is that it is called an organ and not a tissue now.
I was familiar with the mesenteric vein, so I realized that they were not inventing the name, just now calling it an organ.
I’m actually glad about that. Names used to be interesting coinages, inspired by history or mythology or derived from latin or greek roots. “Syphllis” was named after a poem by an Italian doctor (about the disease’s effects). Today, diseases and other medical items are given ungainly acronyms. I’m glad it’s “mesentery”, rather than something like PAFPB (Pyloric Antrum Fluid-Producing Body).
A tear or bulge in the mesentery is called a hernia. Doctors have been operating to repair them for decades. Nothing new about this. Except possibly to re-define it as an ‘organ’.
I dunno. Discoveries like this make me wonder what modern medicine has been doing for, oh, the last 100 years. What is there to say when an utter novice like Leonardo could spot it in decaying corpses, but highly trained medical establishment decided it was just useless fragments and never gave it another thought?
It’s not like nobody knew it was there, or we’ve suddenly learned a lot more about what it does. This ‘news’ is basically a couple guys saying “Hey, since we’re all now more sure than we used to be about this group of tissues all being connected, why don’t we start calling it an ‘organ’ now?”
