Gabriel Weston in Undark Magazine:
The most immutable fact they teach you in medical school is that anatomy is the absolute bedrock of surgery. As an eager young surgical intern, I often got doused in my patients’ vomit and shit. I tried to see the clinical bright side: Maybe the old man’s feces contained blood or the teen who had barfed up the offending Tylenol would avoid a liver transplant. Otherwise, the contents of normal guts were of less interest.
Back then, we were taught that the sole purpose of the gastrointestinal tract was to extract nutrients from food. What I didn’t expect, after practicing as a surgeon myself for over 20 years, is that what we think we know about human anatomy is actually changing all the time and that our bodies are more varied, more full of wonders and magical revelations, than we could ever have imagined.
More here.
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