There's one of those educational plastic human bodies with removable organs on the desk next to me, and I noticed that the intestines are arranged in a rather complex but specific way, with ascending regions and descending regions, and wiggles and corners and zig-zags, all in three dimensions.

Do all humans share the same intestinal configurations, or are there different arrangements possible like with fingerprints? The intestines are very long so I think I'd be surprised if we all had them arranged in exactly the same way.

clop

I tend to say that the majority of people are born with the same types of innards ---but on a rare occasion there are individuals born with a birth defect or two.

This is definitely a good question !

See the following Wiki for one of many types:Wikipedia

My first born had several problems ---non of which are related to the aforementioned link.

I am grateful for that gifted surgical team...though!

__________________
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Your intestines are firmly attached to the back of your abdomen by a sheet of tissue called the mesentry: so they're not free to roam around and adopt randomly different configurations. But there's a bit of room for them to move around depending on posture.
So most folk have roughly the same layout, but there will be minor differences in the exact configuration. An analogy might be a set of curtains: they all hang so that they span the depth and width of the window, but there will always be differences in the particular folds they adopt.
That said, there are various significant developmental anomalies that will alter the layout of the abdomen: malrotation and situs inversus, for instance.

Grant Hutchison

Thanks Grant, so the horror stories of medieval executioners cutting a hole in someone's abdomen and then pulling their intestines out in one long string are myths? Or do the intestines come away from the mesentry if you pull on them hard enough?

clop

There's enough slack to get your small bowel outside on to your abdominal wall, if you're not too fat. A colleague of mine had her abdominal wound fall apart after surgery, and ended up with her lap full of her own small bowel. So she rang the bell for her nurse, and asked for some warm saline packs and a surgeon, in that order.
But if you want to haul someone's bowel out in a long string, you need to divide the mesentry. I suspect mediaeval executioners had a big knife for that purpose.

Grant Hutchison

I had a gut feeling it might be like that. <rimshot>

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Credis itineres inter tempores? O tu stulte, aquire vitam.

The executioner who drew and quartered and so forth you for treason (which is, to my knowledge, the only crime for which this was a punishment) had a whole array of tools to work with; presumably, if he needed a tool for the job, he had it. After all, over the centuries, they had time to work it all out.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Well, I guess they had a lot of practice making sausages.

Since the vein pattern of identical twins is not identical, I would say that it's a pretty good bet that humans each have their own particular configuration of twists and turns in their small intestines. It seems to be one of those things that it would be pointless for genes to regulate.

Genes can mediate gross changes in anatomy, as in people with malrotated guts or mirror-reflections. But once you have a normal mesentry with a normal gut attached to it, the detail is essentially a matter of physics and random chance. A combination of postural changes and the normal propulsive movements of a healthy gut means that a normal person continuously changes the "hang" of their gut in minor ways.

Grant Hutchison

Clop,
No arguement with Grant,just some detail. You are referring to the bowel, and specificly the 'small intestine' , the ileum - in fact about 7 meters of it. If you think about the mesentary like a curtain on a curtain rail, with the bowel on the lower edge, you can see how such a long organ can be anchored to a small area at the back of the abdominal cavity. The actual position of the small bowel will vary, as it moves around by peristalsis.
Except in very unusual conditions, all the other abdominal organs are in very specific positions. Even the 'large intestine' , the colon, though on a mesentary, passes from the right lower corner, up to and across just under the stomach (at the top of the abdomen), to the bottom left hand corner.

JOhn

By the way, it's spelled mesentery. I've no idea why I missed out the third "e" so many times.

Grant Hutchison