With great enthusiasm and repercussion in the international media, a group of scientists announced that the mesentery, a structure located in the gastric cavity, was actually a new organ rather than a series of separate parts and, therefore, should be studied as such.
A request by Dr. J. Calvin Coffey, a researcher at Limerick University Hospital in Ireland, to reclassify this structure as an organ was published in the prestigious British journal Lancet of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, and incorporated into "Gray's Anatomy," one of the most consulted medical texts worldwide.
Around 1510, the genius that was Leonardo da Vinci had already described the mesentery, but without all the details of the current investigators. Sir Frederick Treves, who was the surgeon of Queen Victoria and King Edward VII, and who performed the first appendectomy in London in 1888, was the first to give a detailed anatomical description of this organ. However, despite the years that have passed since then, the mesentery is one of the most ignored organs of the human body.