The Spleen: It Gets No Respect
In one study that appeared in The Lancet in 1977, for example, researchers compared a group of 740 American veterans of World War II who had had their spleens removed as a result of battle injuries with a similar size sample of veterans who had suffered other war injuries but had kept their spleens. The splenectomized men, the researchers found, were twice as likely to die of cardiovascular disease as were the veterans in the control group.
I’ve always liked my spleen.
It’s amazing how doctors used to think that tonsils were something to be routinely removed; the appendix had no useful purpose; and the spleen had some benefit that must have gone out of style with the Stone Age. If these organs didn’t provide a biological advantage to their owners, we never would have evolved them.