Tissues, organs and the long, dark history of anatomy

Scientists believe the mesentery is one ribbon that binds everything in place

Herophilus, born in 335BC near modern-day Istanbul, was regarded as one of the finest physicians of Alexandria. He was also once called a “butcher....who hated humans in order to gain knowledge”.
The city’s rulers supplied him with prisoners to dissect — and he reputedly put some subjects to the knife while they were still breathing. Herophilus is credited with being one of the earliest anatomists, although Andreas Vesalius, in the 16th century, laid the foundations of what we now regard as modern anatomy.

Despite millennia of investigation, the human body still yields the occasional anatomical surprise. Scientists recently claimed to have identified a new organ in the digestive system. The mesentery has been described before but it has been thought of as several individual mesenteries, or fragments of tissue in the digestive system. Now, thanks to more detailed investigations, scientists believe the fragments are in fact different stretches of a single, continuous ribbon that connects the intestine to the abdomen and binds everything in place.

Calvin Coffey, professor of surgery at the University of Limerick, Ireland, has for several years been acquiring evidence for the mesentery to be reclassified as an organ, finally publishing his review in November. He told Discover magazine that the piece of tissue was a continuous structure and essential for life, and therefore met two criteria that some anatomists think are pivotal to organ definition. He argues that the reclassification would allow the nascent field of mesenteric science to flourish in its own right, perhaps opening up therapeutic avenues for digestive disorders.

Fascinatingly, Prof Coffey is unclear who has the authority to designate new organs — if, indeed, anyone has. Even more strangely, there is no definitive list of the body’s organs and scant agreement between anatomists even about how an organ should be defined. Perhaps the best claim to being the arbiter is held by the Federative International Programme for Anatomical Terminology, an organisation of doctors, surgeons and academics.

Commenting on the mesentery news, Fipat member Paul Neumann said: “No two anatomists will agree on a list of organs in the body.” There is even dissent, he said, about whether the skin, popularly believed to be the largest organ in the body, is an organ at all.

Because of the need for cadavers, the history of anatomy and physiology is disproportionately dark. In the 1820s when renowned Edinburgh anatomist Robert Knox found his supply of bodies running low, he began a shadowy association with William Burke and William Hare. It eventually transpired that Burke and Hare murdered 16 vagrants, with Knox rewarding the killers handsomely for the corpses. Burke, ironically, was sentenced to hanging and dissection; Knox fell into disgrace.

Even today, we are struggling to understand the murderous neuro-anatomical legacy of the Third Reich. Last week, the journal Science reported that the Max Planck Society would begin investigating the identities of those killed in the Nazi “euthanasia” programme. Many victims had their brain tissue sent to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research. The Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, the successor to the KWI, is scouring centres across Germany and Europe for remaining brain samples so they can be identified and buried.

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