eli5 How was a whole organ’s usefulness unknown for such a long time(appendix)?
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Since you can very easily live without it, until modern medical equipment and lab equipment was available, there was no real way of knowing. The only way people knew what organs did was either through autopsies of humans or animals or by seeing the effects of certain illnesses or injuries on people. They could tell the difference between healthy organs or diseased organs usually and in some cases could understand the purpose, as in the case of the heart, stomach or lungs. But for organs like the liver or the pancreas or the appendix? For the longest time doctors could only guess as to their function, and there were many theories as to what they did exactly which seem funny to us today.
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