New Human Organ Overturns a Century of Medical Knowledge
The study of the human body, which began as early as 1600 B.C.E., is one of the most complex and profound mysteries of nature that many scientists today still struggle to fully decode. Even in this modern age, its new discoveries have not ceased to amaze the scientific community. Recently, an Irish surgeon’s anatomical breakthrough has overturned a century long medical belief that could potentially open up a whole new realm of scientific study.
Say hello to your mesentery, the newest organ addition to the human body. Tucked behind your abdominal muscles, the mesentery is a structure made of fatty membranes that carries out a vital role in your digestive process. This newly classified organ is delegated with the duty of securing your intestines along your abdominal wall, and plays a key structural role in keeping internal organs suspended above the pelvis and away from entanglement with nearby blood vessels.
But these facts have already been accepted by the scientific community for over a century, so what’s with the newly revived fascination with the mesentery? The answer lies in structure. In biology, structure always closely follows function, and that principle certainly holds true here.
J. Calvin Coffey, a general surgeon and professor at the University of Limerick in Ireland, has recently reclassified the mesentery as an organ after discovering that it was, in fact, contiguous in structure and vital towards digestive functions. His findings were published in the medical journal, The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology, in November 2016 and were readily accepted by the scientific community.
“We are now saying we have an organ in the body which hasn’t been acknowledged as such to date,” Coffey said in a press release.
The original discovery of the mesentery dates as far back as to 1885, when English surgeon Frederick Treves first presented his findings on the digestive tract before the Royal College of Surgeons of England. During that period, Treves had been a well respected expert among his peers, owing to his historically famous draining of an abscess in Edward VII’s royal appendix and his examinations of more than a hundred cadavers. However, the medical field has, since then, been mistakenly convinced that the mesentery existed in “disjointed ribbons” and could not be an organ, which by definition must have a specific structure or a clear function. As recently as 2008, well-respected biology textbooks like the 40th edition of “Gray’s Anatomy” have reproduced the descriptions that Treves presented 131 years ago.
The new report published by Coffey, however, argues otherwise.
“The anatomic description that had been laid down over 100 years of anatomy was incorrect. This organ is far from fragmented and complex,” said Coffey said in a press release. “It has a beginning and an end, and in between it kind of fans out like a Chinese fan.”
This discovery was made by Coffey and a team of colleagues in 2012 after peeling away layers of cells in the gut. In the past four years, the team has invested into extensive research on the mesentery before gathering enough information to propose that the mesentery’s structure and function is so well-defined that it should be considered its own organ.
Although the researchers at the University of Limerick, and now the whole medical community, are still in the process of unearthing all of the mesentery’s mysteries, one thing is for certain: the discovery of the mesentery has opened up a fresh and burgeoning field of scientific study.
“If you understand the function you can identify abnormal function, and then you have disease,” Coffey said. “Put them all together and you have the field of mesenteric science… the basis for a whole new area of science.”
In the same way as gastroenterology, neurology, and coloproctology have been established, one can expect that the mesenteric sciences will soon be spotted among many research universities. Deeper insights into this eccentric organ could lead to less invasive surgeries, fewer complications, shorter patient recovery, and lower costs, in regards to all kinds of abdominal diseases — all of which are great news to the common people and the medical profession alike.
What we see now is only the tip of the iceberg, and in that, lies the true beauty of science. It is always a step ahead of humankind in the race to conquer knowledge, yet constantly existing right before our eyes in the human body itself. The future and potential in mesenteric research is boundless and is a discovery that the public should certainly keep an eye on in the coming decades. Further hurdles and blunders are naturally inevitable, but those future obstacles and breakthroughs will only go to show just how mysterious, fascinating, and complex our universe is — created to be admired and explored by the curiosity of humankind.
