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Comment by emilecantin | Hacker News Reader

As a French-speaking person, I was a bit confused by the word "Spleen", as it means something akin to "Melancholy" in French (it was mostly used by Renaissance poets like Beaudelaire), but I always assumed it was an anglicism or something so I really wasn't expecting it to be a body part.

What's kind of funny is that the French word for this organ, "rate", is used in the idiom "Se dilater la rate", which means laughing a lot.

So the same organ's name is related to both sadness and laughter, depending on the language.

I now realize that I still don't know what a spleen is or what it does in the body; time to fire up Wikipedia!

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The tl;dr; is that the spleen is mostly responsible for "macro" filtering of the blood. It removes relatively large foreign bodies, as well as red blood cells that are starting to wear out (they last 3-4 months, on average before getting filtered out).

Because of its role, there are many blood vessels in the spleen, making it very prone to bleeding if it is damaged. It (along with the liver) is one of the more common sites of serious internal bleeding after physical trauma.

I didn't know until I looked at a dictionary just now that "spleen" can mean "melancholy" in English too... The more common emotional meaning would be something more like "spite" or "anger"; hence the adjective "splenetic". One gets the impression that each different emotion associated with this word corresponds to a different idiosyncratic medieval theory about the emotions originating in the viscera.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galen#Contributions_to_medicin...

Galen and Hippocrates vital humors theory

There is actually a reason for this that follows back all the way to the middle ages belief that your body needed to be in balance, and black bile produced in the spleen was one of the components of that balance.

Granted I was reading about this last night, but I can't remember it to the full extent now.

Unfortunately, that's a bit of a false etymology! According to humorism, black bile [1] comes from the gallbladder, not the spleen. The spleen was supposed to produce yellow bile, an excess of which was thought to cause aggression and anger.

[1] Black bile is actually the source of the term "melancholy" — from the Greek melankholia, from melan- ("black") and kholē ("bile")!

The issue with spleen and black bile in humoralism isn't that it overproduces it, which it doesn't, but rather that it overaccumulates it.

>“The gall, placed in the concave of the liver, extracts choler to it: the spleen, melancholy; which is situate on the left side, over against the liver, a spongy matter, that draws this black choler to it by a secret virtue [emphasis mine], and feeds upon it, conveying the rest to the bottom of the stomach, to stir up appetite, or else to the guts as excrement.”

~ Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy

Just FYI: Baudelaire died in 1867, and was born in the 182x.

Not exactly "Renaissance".

(I'm also French, but my litterature teacher had explained that "spleen" was an organ in English)

Yeah, I saw that after posting, looks like I got my historical periods mixed up. Thanks anyway!

English has an idiom "to vent one's spleen", for a public and obvious display of anger.

Yeah, I suppose the transplant recipient will have to vent her kidney from now on.

I think you meant she'll have to get pissed off.

You are in for a surprise. The spleen is a very big and very important organ that goes largely unnoticed.

I've lived the last 26 years without a spleen, with none of the immunological problems that various physicians threatened. The importance of the spleen exceeds that of the appendix, but only just.

The truth is that I had confused it with the pancreas.

> So the same organ's name is related to both sadness and laughter, depending on the language.

... and in German it's related to craziness. "Einen Spleen haben" literally "Having a spleen" means someone is quirky or eccentric.

My spleen hurts when I laugh a lot :) (Not really, just that part of my body)

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