The pancreas is an organ in your body that helps you digest food and control blood sugar. It makes digestive juices and important hormones like insulin.
From Greek 'pankreas', from 'pan' meaning 'all' and 'kreas' meaning 'flesh'. Ancient doctors named it based on how it looked, as if it were 'all flesh' with no obvious hollow parts.
The name 'pancreas' has nothing to do with sugar or digestion in its original meaning—it just means 'all meat'. Ancient doctors named organs mostly by appearance, long before they understood what those organs actually did.
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