"I Miss My Liver." Nonmedical Sources in the History of Hepatocentrism (2018)
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Ancients, without all the distractions and knowledge we have now, might have been much more attuned to their emotions. They’d likely need to be in order to survive by following intuitions and responding to low-level feelings of fear.
This alone would be reason enough for hepatocentrism.
That reasoning would only be bolstered by knowledge of the liver’s regenerative abilities, its high-desirability to meat-eating predators, its size and weight, its mysterious structural homogeneity (at a macroscopic level), and its visible response (upon inspection) to a life of health or sickness and abuse.
Some emotions are experienced in the gut, for reasons we now understand quite well.
We have neurons in our guts that act as a second brain, and that leads to all sorts of funny feelings and conflicts; the octopus has neurons embedded through all its limbs. Truly otherworldly
> Ancients, without all the distractions and knowledge we have now, might have been much more attuned to their emotions. They’d likely need to be in order to survive by following intuitions and responding to low-level feelings of fear.
There's very little difference in the amount of "knowledge" between any two cultures, or really even between any two people. One culture's collective knowledge may be more reliable or more demonstrated or more productive (by some measure), but everybody's always walking around with a head 100% full of knowledge.
It's a mistake to think that Mesopotamians, Babylonians, and Greeks were "surviving by intuition" under "some low-level feeling of fear". Like us, they were building huge cities with complex trade networks and economies, with obscene bureaucratic processes and people so specialized in craft and work that their whole lives were committed to studying or teaching or keeping account balances in order.
They had rich, interwoven systems of knowledge, and the ancient Greeks in particular fancied mechanics and abstractions much the way we do -- a similarity that exists largely because we openly modeled much of modernity on their culture.
When hepatocentrism prevailed among the Greeks, it wasn't in the context of some scared, emotionally volatile people making do in caves beset by tigers and lions or something. It was in the context of highly educated urbanized people drawing sensible conclusions based on what their culture happened to emphasize in its own web of thoroughly mechanical and abstract concepts.
Some of your suggestions about what facts they were integrating are probably right and many of them are fun to speculate about, but whatever they were, they were being fit into a much more elaborate and abstract schema than you're giving credit to. These were not inbred bumpkins or wild primates making cute guesses and enshrining them in mysterious lore. They were scientists and physicians living and studying in ways not all that differently than our own, and their discoveries were being encoded into myth by the esteemed, committed poets among their aristocracy in much the same way that screenwriters and novelists work modern knowledge into their stories.
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I don’t particularly disagree with your response, but I think you’ve really read into what I was saying and so misrepresent my points. That’s probably my fault since I wrote it quickly.
To hopefully help clarify (but again quickly, since I’m only here to procrastinate and my low-level feelings of fear are growing unpleasant.):
In regard to their distractions and knowledge, I’m simply pointing out that they did not have today’s specific knowledge of human physiology and functioning. This would allow them to speculate further in other directions beyond the interests and areas of focus we have today that have been deemed logical and correct. And they did not have as many ready sources of information to distract them or to assure them that there was nothing more to learn. Sure, perhaps they were blind to this as we are, and so the relative effect would be much the same. But, there was still a quantitative difference in information and sources. And there were certainly branches of the knowledge or paths of specualtion that had not yet been cut off as some are today.
By “ancients”, I include prehistoric man, whose feeling and thoughts would serve as the foundation for historical man’s own ideas and writings. I don’t mean to suggest that they were dumb or anything like that; only that they, without written word, would be more sense-oriented rather than concept-oriented.
And in regard to “low-level feelings of fear”, I do not mean this to be inferior to overt conscious thought and reasoning. In fact, I think we fail all too often to attend to these feelings today and it harms us. These low-level feelings, fear or otherwise, still guide us today. We just don’t notice it as much and prefer to believe we move forward with logical plans rather than intuitive drives.
meaning "a piece of my liver".
Back in the day when I used to have crushes on others, my heart used to feel funny (beat faster etc), but liver? Nope, nothing.
ഇതുവരെ മനസ്സിലായിട്ടില്ല why liver is considered romantic.
(Translated as: haven't yet understood why liver is considered romantic )
Catch 22 put it better of course,
> "... But come to us with a liver complaint and you can fool us for weeks. The liver, you see, is a large, ugly mystery to us. If you’ve ever eaten liver you know what I mean. We’re pretty sure today that the liver exists and we have a fairly good idea of what it does whenever it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing. Beyond that, we’re really in the dark. After all, what is a liver?"
- heart and lung are important to maintain continuous service, but can be replaced with a dumb pump and sparger basically
- brains tend to overhype their own importance but the rest of the body can keep running *okay* for a while with lots of the brain removed (I.e "brain dead but still living")
- kidneys, replace w dialysis, OK enough
- liver, cannot be substituted except for transplants, body just doesn't work with it gone
- in principle it kind of separates multicellular animals ... You have to be 3d to contain a double ended open tube
- the intestine/stomach is our daily bargain with death so to speak, to prolong our own life by devouring other life
- *digestion is highly responsive to autonomic arousal*, I.e. emotional qualia. Think of the stomach feeling metaphors of love, fear, rage, anticipation ...
- in fact many emotions are best described *in terms of* their digegstive qualia
- Digestive stuff is quite highly innervated, read about the neurobiology of guts for a great rabbit hole
- etc.
- and finally "guts" is already culturally establishrd, "gut feeling" "trust your gut" "has guts" etcThen I read about Native Americans (and many other cultures) prioritizing consuming the liver above all other organs and started to get curious.
Also, I can personally confirm that alcohol is damaging to the soul---not merely the body.
(I have cut my alcohol to 2 drinks per week to look after my liver - still looking forward to life taking care of itself!)
I feel culturally American now though and huge part of that is feeling alienated, pressured and ridiculed when back in the UK because of my refusal of alcohol.
I don’t even talk about it or ‘holier than thou’ about it or even care at all about others drinking but many people back there see it as a personal insult if I choose not to drink. Even if i sneak a Shandy or 0% beer.
So weird to me now but I was fully part of that culture until aged 28. I even remember ‘jokingly’ bullying people into drinking to excess.
I’m now 46 and have been in the USA since 2005 full time.
Three older relatives died of liver disease.
I met one uncle at the pub last month.
He’s yellow.
I used to drink a lot more, but now I find it hard to stand. No buzz just the stupification.
And of course drink is very toxic and will set back all your other goals from good sex, to muscles, weight loss and cognitive function.
White liver: a cultural disorder resembling AIDS (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8456330/)
Except that "liver" (etc) and "life" have no etymological relationship, so this coincidence can't have anything to do with Germanic culture, much less Celtic(?!) culture.
It just seems like a more obvious “center” for an ancient person; the mechanics are so easily detectable from the outside, while the liver sits silently.
Meanwhile there's this huge organ in your chest with a non-obvious purpose, I don't think it's that unreasonable for someone to claim it holds your soul or something.
In more old folk belief in middle east for example; heart, liver and stomach have different emotions associated with them. Liver is attachment and grief, heart is excitement and love, stomach is contentment, frustration, anger. Growing up in the region I have these associations too. These are often from old medicine like the works of Ibn Sina, who mostly recited ancient Greek, Egyptian, Indian and Chinese doctrins.
Gastroenterologist are a funny and good natured bunch my sister's boss would say "Poop is my bread and butter".
Puts a different light on prometheus's punishment. His liver devoured by eagle and then grown back to be devoured again. It's like his soul/essence is reborn or reincarnated daily to be destroyed again.
Therefore even if this may be just a coincidence that the legend of Prometheus includes the periodic regrowth of his liver after being wounded, there is also the possibility that some ancient people were aware of some cases of liver regeneration, though it is not clear how they could have discovered that.
- Injuries to the lungs aren't always fatal but patients tend to have lasting breathing problems.
- Liver injuries... hmmm, make your eyes turn yellowish, and it seems like those who come from the region where they drink hot water with some plant inside tend to fare better than those who don't, and if you survive, eyes return to normal and you can make a full recovery.
The article says that there have also been several other authors who have speculated like me that the Greeks might have been aware of the regeneration ability of the liver.
The article continues to say that they do not believe that this was possible.
I agree that it is very unlikely that they were aware of liver regeneration, but it was not impossible.
At that time, they would have seen very frequently wounds to the liver, from spears, arrows or swords. Most of the wounded would have died due to infections but some of them would have survived and recovered.
The unlikely element is only the conclusion that their liver had regenerated, because it is unlikely that their corpses would have been dissected after death, to examine their livers. Nevertheless, in Egypt the viscera were removed before mummification. Therefore it is possible that some Egyptians could have noticed cases of liver regeneration and this knowledge could have been passed to some Greeks.
Even so, they might have thought that the cases of liver regeneration are an exception that can happen only with the help of gods, because most liver wounds must have been fatal, due to infections or blood loss.