Spleen. What a word. And what an organ—Natalie Angier, writing in the Times, reports that scientists at Harvard Med and Mass General have found that the spleen, “long consigned to the B-list of abdominal organs,” is actually incredibly important. It’s like a “standing army,” ready to deploy an arsenal of monocytes in the event of serious trauma.
And you thought your spleen wasn’t necessary. In fact, should you be despleened, you would be at “an enhanced risk of early death.”
The spleen was not always so disrespected. Angier points out its rich poetic and medical history, citing Galen’s humoral theory, which held that the spleen was a source of black bile—the muck which, in excess, was thought to make people mean, spiteful, cranky, and melancholic. The splenetic temperament is one especially associated with the English: in 1691, William Temple called his native land “the region of spleen,” and blamed his countrymen’s melancholy on the weather. An overbilious spleen was believed to cause a serious medical condition, akin to what we think of today as clinical depression. Anne Kingsmill Finch, an English countess who suffered from melancholia, wrote a poem entitled, “The Spleen,” in 1713, which begins:
What art thou, SPLEEN, which ev’ry thing dost ape?
Thou Proteus to abus’d Mankind,
Who never yet thy real Cause cou’d find,
Or fix thee to remain in one continued Shape.
Still varying thy perplexing Form,
Now a Dead Sea thou’lt represent,
A Calm of stupid Discontent,
Then, dashing on the Rocks wilt rage into a Storm.
But the spleen carried a wider association with all sorts of high spirits, including mirth and laughter. In an essay in “A History of English Laughter,” Kay Himberg explains that laughter was thought to “counteract the splenetic condition in a medical way,” or, as we might say, Laughter is the best medicine. Shakespeare used “spleen” to mean “amusement” in “Twelfth Night”: “If you desire the spleene, and will laughe your selues into stitches, follow me.”
The true Orpheus of the modern spleen, however, took it in a decidedly melancholic direction. Charles Baudelaire, as Angier notes, used the bad temper associated with the organ as a favorite motif in both “Les Fleurs du Mal” and a later prose collection, “Le Spleen de Paris.” Though Baudelaire’s use of the word is even further removed from its physiological reference, he turns, like Temple and Finch, to the weather. As his poem titled “Spleen” famously begins (in a translation by Edna St. Vincent Millay),
When the low, heavy sky weighs like the giant lid
Of a great pot upon the spirit crushed by care,
And from the whole horizon encircling us is shed
A day blacker than night, and thicker with despair.