Copyright 2008
Ashley Davidoff MD
Your little soul seems to have stirred more spirit in
The bubble bubble toil and trouble of culture
Than it has in the stirring of lipids in the gut
The mechanisms by which you function are glorious
And you concentrate and store
A golden colored fluid that looks like a yellowing to green virgin olive oil,
And your flow is controlled by unique mechanisms of the
Juice gates and sluice gates of sludge
And the way the bile flows up
Your beautiful spiral valves of Heister
Were an unrecognized lesson for the waterscrews of Nebuchadnezzar and the Eureka! man
And of course you provide the yellow color for sludge and sewerage
Not a great attribute I know
But nevertheless a function to rid our body of bili waste
Yet somehow when the surgeon’s laparoscopic knife,
Snuffs out your fire
The body seems no worse for the loss.
This seems so odd to me, since I trust the value of what is natural
And what has evolved with the wisdom of time
Maybe you were not designed to receive the diets of the day,
And your doom is a stone throw away from extinction
But that story will not come in my lifetime – and perhaps not for the next few thousand
And perhaps even …. not at all
Since we may in fact in the science of the day
Be ignorant of your true secrets.
So I will sing to the stories of your glory Hallelujah!
Or rather as the house of the fluid that stirred the story
As you excited innumerable cultures
Sometimes a part of a deity,
Sometimes as a vital force of the body, and
Sometimes with your gall, guile, gumption, and guts.
We start in Babylon a mere 3000 years ago
When you were a part of a godly soul – the liver
Who was seen as the deity who would predict the outcome of war
And you stood there in all your glory
A pouch of green fluid in the sheep’s warm, wet, and bloodied liver of sacrifice
And you spread your hepatoscopic influence under the godly protection of your mother organ to the
Etruscans, Greeks and even into Ezekiel 21:21.
In the Chinese Culture of Qi
You are the Yang of judgment and courage
What noble attributes you are afforded!
In the Judaic culture they called you mererah by your bitter taste –
And in in Jeremiah 9:1 and Deutoronomy 29:18
You are paired with wormwood as something bitter and undesirable
While the the Greeks and Aristotle especially
Studied you in nature and found you were missing in certain species
Including the dove, deer, and horse
And above this you were given the honor of producing a humor of Hippocrates
One of the four that drove the body
To balance or imbalance, and to health or disease
You produced the yellow bile while your neighbour the spleen produced it in black
And when the balance shifted to yellow, melancholy was the order of the day
And when it was black – one had better stay back
Cause ’twas, the choleric nature that came to the fore.
In addition you were thought to represent the element of earth
With a quality that was cold and dry
And not only that….
You gave character to the person
In the form of gluttonous, introspective, and sentimental behaviour
Who knows where all this came from?
But it was used for hundreds of years
Even as we turned from BC to AD
And even by the doctors of kings
Galen himself
Who saw you as protector of the liver and a source of emotion
Then came Paracelsus with his hermetical ideas of harmony
The seven in the sky aligned with seven of the earth aligned with seven in the body
And you were aligned with Mars in the sky and and iron on the earth
In all fairness however, the world became a little better,
As he started the move away from the humors
And finally toward other chemistry
Vesalius learned you from the source
As his studies of anatomy Fabrica 5
Were real and true
And then da Vinci as well as Harvey appreciated your gracile and pear like form
When it came to literature “claw us on the gall” by Chaucer meant add insult to injury
While he used honey and gall as opposites of taste
And the “gall of the dragon” was to be an extreme punishment.
Shakespeare explored, used and exposed you in so many rich ways
In his ” “let the galled jade wince,” “gall a new healed wound,” “but the gout galls the one, and the pox pinches the other.”
Irritation is the order of the day
“Some galled goose of winchester would hiss,” and “‘twould be my tyranny to strike and gall them, “, and ” as fearfully doth a galled rock.”
Seem like an advanced form of irritation and perhaps an implication of anger
“Let there be gall enough in thy ink”
Reveals his knowledge of the use of oak galls in the creation of purple black ink
“But I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall”
Reveals his knowledge of the lack of the gall bladder in pigeons and his familiarity with the work of Aristotle
(Even when an ogle on Google was not around )
And then “and take my milk for gall you murdering ministers”
As lady Macbeth describes the prejudice of the day
With her desire to unsex herself
And the differences between man and woman
The one for bitter boldness and the other maternal comfort
The Zulus of South Africa are a proud and feared nation
And they have as their medicinal and spiritual leader
the Sangoma
Who wears a headress with the garnered gallbladders of goats
Symbolising and elevating the organ as a receiver and giver of life
Just like its counterpart the uterus
Which has similar pear like shape and spiritual function.
And so we turn back to the advancement of science
And the time in 1733 when Louis Petit suggested we remove the stone of affliction
And when Carl Langenbuch in 1882 did just that
And we futzed many years later with the fuzzy technology of gallbladder lithotripsy and Urso
Only to come up with a better laparoscopic solution 100 years after Langenbuch
The waves of sound brought great things in detection,
And found that about 1 in 8 who ate the western diet
Suffered the fate of the state of a gallbladdder with stone
And the percutaneous drainage under the eyes and guise of sound waves
Was a also great advance in the very sick
Yet we come back to the question as to why you are around?
A question and answer yet to be found –
perhaps.
But after a lot of fun and games through history and literature
We can only hail you O bladder of Gall
As the source of gall, guile, gumption, and guts.
References
Aristotle History of animals Doves have no gallbladders and they are emblems of guilessness