4 ms·

Then what of the Italian scientist who noted them 200 years ago? All of those dissections and attention to research in the modern age and it was actually taugh

Then what of the Italian scientist who noted them 200 years ago? All of those dissections and attention to research in the modern age and it was actually taught in medical school that the brain had no lymphatic system? Seems a little far-fetched.

kingkawn 9y ago
Welcome to medicine
dwringer 9y ago
That reminded me of another example of this I remember seeing in the headlines; I'm not sure if this [1] is the one I'm recalling, but basically this is a similar situation for a different structure in the brain that was discovered in 1881 and then forgotten/ignored and omitted from medical texts for about a century. [1] http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/november/mystery-brain-imaging-112014.html http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/november/mystery-brain-im...
efficax 9y ago
We still have a very poor understanding of the body. We're still discovering organs we didn't know we had: https://theoutline.com/post/851/scientists-identify-new-organ-in-the-human-body https://theoutline.com/post/851/scientists-identify-new-orga... It's entirely plausible to me that this has gone unnoticed for 200 years.
- mfoy_ 9y ago
  No, they reclassified something they knew we had as an organ. Not like "whoa, what's this thing??".
jerf 9y ago
"Then what of the Italian scientist who noted them 200 years ago?" Two possibilities come to mind. First, he may have been studying a rare brain that had an enlarged system, and since he did not have preconceptions that what he found couldn't possibly be a component of the lymphatic system, he called it like he saw it. (It is also possible such brains were less rare back then or something. Many things have changed in our body's environments in the last 200 years. Random correlations abound.) The other is that perhaps he was simply wrong. He saw something that he identified as a lymphatic component but was in fact something else. Future people didn't make the same mistake so the observation sank without a trace. 200 years later, the real and much-more-subtle lymphatic system was found.
justifier 9y ago
Your comment reminded me of this recent video documenting something similar: https://youtu.be/faVlZRGyBDs https://youtu.be/faVlZRGyBDs Video description: Leonardo became obsessed with the heart in the latter period of his remarkable life. He made a prediction about the main blood vessel leaving the heart, the aorta. He had figured out how the flow of blood out of the heart actually closes the aortic valve. Leonardo had no way of testing it and no way of seeing inside a working heart. For centuries no one else even speculated. But in the last 50 years technology has finally been invented to show that he was absolutely right.

kingkawn 9y ago

Welcome to medicine

dwringer 9y ago

That reminded me of another example of this I remember seeing in the headlines; I'm not sure if this [1] is the one I'm recalling, but basically this is a similar situation for a different structure in the brain that was discovered in 1881 and then forgotten/ignored and omitted from medical texts for about a century. [1] http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/november/mystery-brain-imaging-112014.html http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/november/mystery-brain-im...

efficax 9y ago

We still have a very poor understanding of the body. We're still discovering organs we didn't know we had: https://theoutline.com/post/851/scientists-identify-new-organ-in-the-human-body https://theoutline.com/post/851/scientists-identify-new-orga... It's entirely plausible to me that this has gone unnoticed for 200 years.

mfoy_ 9y ago
No, they reclassified something they knew we had as an organ. Not like "whoa, what's this thing??".

jerf 9y ago

"Then what of the Italian scientist who noted them 200 years ago?" Two possibilities come to mind. First, he may have been studying a rare brain that had an enlarged system, and since he did not have preconceptions that what he found couldn't possibly be a component of the lymphatic system, he called it like he saw it. (It is also possible such brains were less rare back then or something. Many things have changed in our body's environments in the last 200 years. Random correlations abound.) The other is that perhaps he was simply wrong. He saw something that he identified as a lymphatic component but was in fact something else. Future people didn't make the same mistake so the observation sank without a trace. 200 years later, the real and much-more-subtle lymphatic system was found.

justifier 9y ago

Your comment reminded me of this recent video documenting something similar: https://youtu.be/faVlZRGyBDs https://youtu.be/faVlZRGyBDs Video description: Leonardo became obsessed with the heart in the latter period of his remarkable life. He made a prediction about the main blood vessel leaving the heart, the aorta. He had figured out how the flow of blood out of the heart actually closes the aortic valve. Leonardo had no way of testing it and no way of seeing inside a working heart. For centuries no one else even speculated. But in the last 50 years technology has finally been invented to show that he was absolutely right.