The annals of medical history prove that the average human meat sack is surprisingly resilient. The literature is dotted with extraordinary case studies, such as a French man found in 2007 to be living without 90 per cent of his brain.
The 44-year-old was leading a normal life when doctors discovered he had an extreme case of hydrocephalus, where brain tissue is replaced by cerebrospinal fluid.
It’s a startling example of biological redundancy and adaptation, where surviving tissues take on the function of lost tissue (in this case, through neuroplasticity).
Something similar can happen in paired organs such as the lungs, kidneys or testes. If one is lost, the surviving organ can take on the function of two.
In other cases, astonishing medical technology keeps people alive after the loss of essential organs.
A young American man, for example, carried a functioning artificial heart around in a backpack for 555 days after his own was removed but before he could receive a transplant.
In ‘empty chest cases’, surgeons remove a patient’s heart and lungs, and their functions are replaced by a life-support system called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO).
There are also examples where people have lived without multiple organs.
Some patients with stomach cancer need to have multiple digestive organs removed, which can include the complete stomach, spleen, pancreas, small intestine and colon.
In these cases, they survive with a combination of enzyme replacement, modified diet and intravenous feeding, plus insulin replacement.
Other internal organs that you can live without include the gallbladder, bladder, thyroid and appendix.
It’s unclear if there’s a limit on how many organs a person could live without at any one time, although losing several in any one incident would risk death by blood loss, infection or sheer trauma.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Miriam Russell, Hull) 'How many organs could I survive without?'
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