Abstract
The Greek anatomists of the Alexandrian school of medicine that flourished about 300 bc were familiar with the pancreas and were probably responsible for naming this organ, whose name means “all flesh”. The word they used for “flesh” was the word for animal meat used for food, which suggests that at that time the pancreas, still one of the organs prized as “sweetbread”, may have been a delicacy. Andreas Vesalius in his famous work On the Fabric of the Human Body, published in 1543, differentiated between the pancreas and the mesenteric lymph nodes but some confusion about the distinction appears to have persisted for almost a century after that time. In 1642 Wirsung identified, in man, the pancreatic duct that still bears his name.
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© 1995 Springer-Verlag London Limited
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Cruickshank, A.H., Benbow, E.W. (1995). The Normal Pancreas. In: Pathology of the Pancreas. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3005-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3005-5_1
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