More Than Skin Deep

G emara (Sanhedrin 39a) relates that a heretic once approached Rabban Gamliel and said “I know how many stars there are in the heavens.” The great sage responded “Tell me how many molars and teeth are there in your mouth?” At that the heretic put his hand into his mouth and began counting. Rabban Gamliel had been waiting for that: “What is in your mouth you don’t know but what’s in the heavens you do know?”

That gemara came to mind recently when I read news reports about the discovery by medical researchers of a new organ — the 79th one — in the human body called the mesentery. In simplified terms the mesentery consists of a folded-over sheet of connective tissue called peritoneum that holds the intestines in place in the abdominal cavity.

Now this finding the result of detailed microscopic and electron microscopic examinations by colorectal surgeon J. Calvin Coffey and his research team at Ireland’s University of Limerick isn’t quite as dramatic as it sounds. In other words it’s not as if for decades doctors doing CT scans have noticed the mesentery hanging around inside people but wrote it off as maybe a sponge left inside the last time a patient had surgery. Discover magazine explains:

While anatomists knew it was there it was always thought to be composed of several different segments as opposed to being one single structure. This knocked it out of contention for organ status as our bodily organs must be continuous as well as provide some vital function to our anatomy.