[HN Gopher] "I Miss My Liver." Nonmedical Sources in the History...
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"I Miss My Liver." Nonmedical Sources in the History of
Hepatocentrism (2018)
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 42 points
Date : 2024-03-09 14:43 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
| simpletone wrote:
| "Hepatocentrism was a medical doctrine that considered the liver
| the center of the whole human being."
|
| 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.
| adrian_b wrote:
| What is interesting is that the liver is one of the few human
| organs which are really able to regrow after an injury.
|
| 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.
| marci wrote:
| Warfare may have helped. When you see often enough some
| injuries and how people recover (or not) from them, some may
| see patterns and intuit recovery mechanism:
|
| - 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.
| mohaba wrote:
| To me, it is clear you are referencing jaundice for the
| second one, but I am not sure what plants are good for
| that.
| sincerely wrote:
| I think they're talking about coffee, iirc there are some
| studies that show it helps with liver cirrhosis which can
| cause jaundice
| kragen wrote:
| the article claims that this was impossible
| bmer wrote:
| Was the heart still considered the seat of "emotion", in such a
| doctrine?
| bgnn wrote:
| It depends I think.
|
| 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.
| ofcrpls wrote:
| In Hindi/Urdu, one phrase to describe a beloved is jigar/kaleja
| ka tukra/jigr kaa ttukdd'aa/[?][?][?]jgarkh ttkhrr
|
| meaning "a piece of my liver".
| pySSK wrote:
| Same in Persian. I didn't know the difference between _jigar_
| and _kaleja_. Looks like _kaleja_ is of Sanskrit origin while
| _jigar_ is of Persian origin.
| kelipso wrote:
| Similar in Malayalam. Lots of romantic songs translated
| literally would have "my liver" (kr[?], karal), instead of "my
| heart" for example.
| fooker wrote:
| When you use kaleja in that phrase, it means heart.
| datameta wrote:
| I wonder if this was due to the liver being the largest organ? Or
| perhaps liver disease is the most visible?
| ladon86 wrote:
| It's pretty surprising that they believed this. The heart is very
| obviously thumping in your chest, and it's very easy to notice
| that the (visible) veins in your wrists, neck and thighs are
| pulsing at the same rate.
|
| 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.
| some_random wrote:
| I think that's at least partially a view that's obvious because
| we now consider the heart the "center" of the body. The lungs
| are obviously expanding as you breath, your stomach obviously
| digests your food into what becomes you, blows to the head
| cause mental issues so it's obvious that the brain is used to
| think.
|
| 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.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Agreed. We put the things we want to believe, but don't have
| evidence for, in places where we have the least evidence
| lying around to contradict them. It's why there's a woo woo
| subculture that uses words like "quantum" in dubious ways.
| asveikau wrote:
| Not only that but the heart rate changes with your breathing,
| physical activity, thoughts, emotions ... I want to say it "has
| the pulse" but that sounds like a corny literal use of the
| expression.
| baryphonic wrote:
| When I was in high school, we read the Canterbury Tales. In "The
| Wife of Bath's Tale," a knight violates a young woman. He is
| described as having a "lusty liver."
| meindnoch wrote:
| "White liver refers to a condition characterized by sexual
| excess and a wasting to death of sexual partners."
|
| White liver: a cultural disorder resembling AIDS
| (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8456330/)
| chimpanzee wrote:
| Moderns tend to focus on mechanics and abstractions, leading to a
| focus on the heart and the head/brain. We denigrate emotions and
| try to ignore them, but if we attend to them we notice that they
| primarily arise, or are felt, in the gut.
|
| 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.
| bluesky19 wrote:
| Yeah. "fundamental discoveries irrefutably demonstrated the
| central role of the heart in human physiology" seems like an
| awfully narrow perspective.
| jdietrich wrote:
| _> if we attend to them we notice that they primarily arise, or
| are felt, in the gut_
|
| Some emotions are experienced in the gut, for reasons we now
| understand quite well.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut%E2%80%93brain_axis
| swatcoder wrote:
| You're right that we have a different web of concepts and
| emphasize different abstractions than other cultures did, but
| this bit paints a really misleading picture of who we're
| talking about and how sophisticated their ideas were:
|
| > 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.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| Edit/tldr: my original comment concerned the foundation of or
| the seed of the historic belief of hepatocentrism rather than
| the reasoning or knowledge held by those whose writings were
| influenced by or regarding hepatocentrism once it was already
| established.
|
| ------
|
| 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.
| snarkconjecture wrote:
| > All of these terms, including the Anglo-Saxon word "lifere,"
| seem to closely resemble the English verb "to live," underscoring
| the relation of the liver to life in populations influenced by
| the Celtic culture.
|
| 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.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| Tbh after a neuropharm PhD - Hepatocentrism makes more sense than
| cardiocentrism at the very least. _Everything_ happens in the
| liver to some degree, more than the "toxin remediation" metaphor
| its closer to "the entire chemicals and materials industry"
|
| 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?"
|
| Like if we have to choose some Centrism at all,
| - 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
|
| Personally I'd go for a digestive centric view:
| - 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" etc
| zetazzed wrote:
| Hercule Poirot (in "The Cornish Mystery"): "Hein, the pancreas is
| nothing. Of the digestive organs, the liver is the key. Look
| after the liver and life will take care of itself."
|
| (I have cut my alcohol to 2 drinks per week to look after my
| liver - still looking forward to life taking care of itself!)
| canjobear wrote:
| I don't buy it. The word "heart" is literally cognate to "core".
| This suggests a very old view that the heart is central.
| TheGeminon wrote:
| According to Wiktionary in English that didn't appear until the
| 14th century (although that is earlier than the article
| suggests)
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/heart
| martinjacobd wrote:
| meh the OED has this from early old English (albeit in the
| form of 'heortan') in the mid-tenth century from Bald's
| Leechbook.
| dghughes wrote:
| I still recall when my sister worked as a medical secretary for a
| gastroenterologist she brought home a pamphlet "Be Kind To Your
| Liver". It's crazy how little people know of their liver; fatty
| liver, acetaminophen toxicity, ethanol processing via
| dehydrogenase of males vs females.
|
| Gastroenterologist are a funny and good natured bunch my sister's
| boss would say "Poop is my bread and butter".
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