 There actually are many accessory organs. In this section, we're going to talk about the liver, and we're going to talk about the pancreas. And I guess we're actually going to talk about the gallbladder, too. The salivary glands are also accessory organs. So, parotid, submandibular. Sure, mandibular. And sublingual. Those are also accessory organs. It just was easier to talk about them in the oral cavity section. So, liver, gallbladder, pancreas. Let's start out with the liver. Liver, I just want you to take a minute, and you'll notice that most of us have our livers on our right side. So, Pat, your liver right now. Your liver, your liver is a lifesaver. It is incredible. The liver, the jobs of the liver are ridiculous, diverse. We should have an entire class on the liver, and we are not going to have an entire class. The liver is responsible for detoxing your blood. It's one of the reasons why if you are an alcoholic, it damages your liver because alcohol is a poison. It's yeast pee. You ingest your alcohol. Every single thing you ingest. Okay, did you hear this? Let's get, let's, let me clarify. Every single thing you absorb from your lumen of your digestive tube will go through the liver. Every single thing. So when you drink 800 gallons of yeast pee because you think it's fun, all of that poison goes to your liver. And then your liver's like, ah, what did you do and why did you do this to me? Don't worry, I got you. You must have made a mistake and accidentally poisoned yourself. I will fix it. And your liver goes through and the cells in your liver literally detox that alcohol. You take it down, change it up. That's hard on a liver. The liver takes one for the team and gets itself poisoned to protect the rest of the body. It totally takes one for the team in all forms of poisons. But super interesting that every single thing that you absorb in the digestive tract goes through the liver. The liver has other functions. One of them that is related to the digestive system is that it also produces bile. And someday, if you're lucky, I'll tell you the Linus the Pig story about bile and the five pound tub of butter. And we could even call and interview my brother who was Linus's father at the time and find out, like, dude, what happens if you eat a five pound tub of butter? Bile is a substance that is produced in the liver and it is stored in the gallbladder and it helps emulsify fat. So it's a secretion that is dumped into the duodenum and when it's in there, it actually helps break down. It surrounds fat blobs and increases the surface area so that there's more surface area for lipases or fat enzymes to break that fat up so that it's in a small enough chunk that you can actually absorb it into your bloodstream. Fat is like gold. Like, we are bodies. It's an excellent source of energy and you want to absorb as much of it as you can even when you don't want to absorb as much of it as you can and so your body is actually pretty efficient at it. The bile is clarified. It's stored in the gallbladder. It's produced in the liver so make sure you're super clear on that. Let's look at how this is actually all going to be related. So I'm going to go to another page because I'm going to draw my own wendified version of this little scenario here and my wendified version is going to have a liver. So this is purely diagrammatic and I'm doing this for you so that you can see the ducts that are involved in bile production and our pancreas are going to come into this mix too. So we actually have a couple of ducts in the liver and again, this is totally diagrammatic, yikes, because that duct would not be working very well, would it? You have the left and right hepatic ducts and these guys are receiving bile from the liver. So bile tends to be green and the bile is being dumped into these hepatic ducts. The hepatic duct, the left and right hepatic duct combine and form the common hepatic duct. The common hepatic duct travels to a place where it actually, this is a super interesting juncture because most of the time you'd be like, dude, the bile is headed this direction. The bile can actually head up or down at this point and it has, this is the gallbladder. This is the cystic duct. So bile produced in the liver travels down the left or right hepatic duct into the common hepatic duct. It then can travel down to the duodenum or it can go up to the gallbladder and be stored in the gallbladder. Bile can also be secreted from the gallbladder and travel down the cystic duct and into the common bile duct. The common bile duct combines or joins with the main, this is its name, pancreatic duct, that's a good name. I don't know why it's a gland, so it's kind of puffy. This is the pancreas. So the pancreas is also secreting stuff and we'll talk about what it's secreting in just a second. These two ducts combine and this is another really interesting piece. So they combine into a structure, okay, so it's like these two ducts, common bile duct and main pancreatic duct, both empty into this place called the hepato-pancreatic ampula. Hepato-liver, pancreatic, pancreas, ampula. And I want to say ampula is like hangout zone. And then it empties into the duodenum. It's through the, this is the duodenum, duodenum. And this is the major duodenal papilla. So it's almost like a little nipple because that's what papilla means. The major duodenal papilla. Okay, the hepato-pancreatic ampula has a little sphincter at the end of it. So there's like a tightening here that can control whether or not we're going to let stuff in. And nicely it's called the hepato-pancreatic sphincter. And I'm going to tell you because I like these things, even though they're trying to get rid of them in anatomy. This is the sphincter of Odie. Yes. What? The sphincter of Odie. And this is the ampula of Vader. What? Why would you ever change that? The ampula of Vader is the space where we hang out and wait and the sphincter of Odie controls whether or not the stuff is going to get in. Okay, that's cool. Pancreas. What are they doing? What are they doing? What? The pancreas is producing mad enzymes like all of your lipases, your sugar digesters, your proteases, all of your nutrient enzymes. Your pancreas are making those. Your pancreas, I feel like I said this already. Your pancreas is also producing bicarbonate ions. Bicarbonate ions. And that is to neutralize the pH of the stomach acid that is entering the duodenum. So your pancreas, now who, what part of your pancreas is doing this, you guys? The pancreas is producing this substance and dumping it into the duodenum. So what kind of gland is the pancreas being? It's being an exocrine gland. And the structures that are producing these substances are called assini. Like 98% of the pancreas is made up of assini producing enzymes and bicarb. The other 2% is endocrine. So the pancreas has endocrine function. And where do you think the endocrine substances are being secreted? They must be secreted into the blood, right? And so there are two main hormones that are secreted. There's insulin and glucagon. And I was going to say something about that. Oh, it's produced in these structures called pancreatic islets or another like cool person's name, the islets of Langerhans. Why would we get rid of those things? Okay, I think that looks good to me. How's it looking to you? All right, our last task is to look at the mesenteries in the body which is a conceptual and spatial challenge. Let's do it.