In 1885, the English surgeon Frederick Treves gave a series of talks at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Treves’s most famous moment in abdominal history — treating Edward VII a few days before the king’s coronation by draining an abscess in the royal appendix — would come decades later. But even by the late 19th century, Treves was known among his peers as an expert of the guts. He spoke at length to his fellow doctors about the digestive tract, having examined it in a hundred or so cadavers.
The medical field was receptive to his findings. It remained so. As recently as 2008, textbooks like the 40th edition of “Gray’s Anatomy” echoed descriptions that Treves presented in his lectures. But Treves’s research contained an error that persisted for more than a century, wrote a pair of scientists in the Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology journal, published in November but spotted recently by the Independent: Treves neglected to give the mesentery, a double sheet of connective tissue that curls through the abdomen, the importance it deserved, as an organ.
Treves declared that the mesentery existed only sporadically, in disjointed ribbons, dispersed among the intestines and therefore did not meet the definition of an organ; an organ, broadly speaking, must be a self-contained structure that performs a specific bodily function.
That the mesentery was so divided was not correct, the researchers wrote in the new report. “The anatomic description that had been laid down over 100 years of anatomy was incorrect. This organ is far from fragmented and complex,” said J. Calvin Coffey, a study author and surgeon at the University of Limerick, Ireland, in a statement. “It is simply one continuous structure.”
exceprt from Washington Post
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