New LIGHT on ORIGIN of Troublesome APPENDIX

Sun (Christchurch), Volume IV, Issue 1164, 3 November 1917, Page 12 (Supplement)

New LIGHT on ORIGIN of Troublesome APPENDIX

I |~\ROF. W. COLIN MacKENZIE of I London launched recently a new * series of researches into the : origin of the little wooly worm, > called the vermiform appendix, ) which like a tassel or tail, curls ; away from the right-angled junction I of the small bowel and the big intestine. i The appendix is really an intestine 3 in minature, blind at one end. It rer sembles a hollowed-out pug dog's ; tail. Nevertheless, it is as inconstant as the moon in size, shape and i locality. It may be as small and i- straight as a penny horn or as twistt ed as a French horn. i The appendix is, to be sure, a side Y issue as far as usefulness and cat pacity to digest food is concerned. t It is helpless to your digestion. It 8 is without power to empty fluids or juices from its abbreviated canal - Into the lumen which opens into the i "calcum," the big intestine. This

By DR. L. K. HIRSHBERG writhing, wriggly, pug-tail bit of hose resembles and behaves more or less as a finger stall. If you were to carve a hole in<*your garden hose and sew the forefinger of a glove over the hole, you would have a working model of the appendix and the calcum. Obviously, Nature has seen fit to leave a remnant, an extra-piece or a "left-over end" to the intestine. Just as a dressmaker often sews together many parts over and beyond her needs and finally trims off most of them or leaves a little more "for letting out" later on, so it seems that nature has left or provided this blind alley as a place for eddies, whirlpools and torrents, which rush from the small intestine at a sharp bend into the colon or large intestine, f It must be plain from all this Newspaper Feature Service, 1917.

that hardened food or what not, iE left just within the doorway of the appendix, like that before Ali Baba's cave, might so compress the bloodways that decay would quickly set in. This is the condition known as appendicitis. Want of exercise and a normally poor flow of blood to the appendix, invites just such a catastrophe.