Tegan Taylor
speaker
14,397 appearances
403 recordings
12 series
first heard Mar 2020
last heard 22 Sep
Tegan Taylor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 24 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 13.
Appearances
What's That Rash? · Tonsils, appendix, gallbladder: is anything actually useless? · 28 Apr 2026
podcast
And we've talked about most of them, ear muscles, wisdom teeth, appendix, tailbone, body hair, like you said.
Weidersheim published a book called The Structure of Man in the late 1800s, talking about 86 human organs he considered vestigial.
And one of them was, as you say, the pineal gland.
And the more we look at
the more we see about how useful some of these organs are that we might not have otherwise understood.
Like tonsils, for instance.
We used to kind of whip them out the minute they got infected in kids.
And now there's actually quite a high bar you've got to cross if you're going to have a tonsillectomy.
So you've still got your tonsils.
You obviously dodged that when you were a kid.
Luxury.
No, they're part of our immune system.
They're actually quite an important part of our lymphatic and immune system.
They kind of taste potential infections as they're coming into the body.
And so I suppose the standard of evidence is higher now than it used to be.
Like they still perform tonsillectomies, but you sort of have to have had a certain number of infections to a certain level of severity for your medical team to kind of go, okay, the risks have been outweighed by the benefits now.
We're going to take these out rather than just kind of whipping them out and not thinking about what potential knock-on effects there could be.
So tonsils are one of those things where whipping them out, it's no joke if you've ever had that surgery, but they're fairly accessible.
You can get to them without having to, say, open up someone's abdomen, which you have to do if you want to remove something like a gallbladder or an appendix.
Appendices especially are organs that for a long time until pretty recently, we kind of didn't really appreciate how important they were.
Showing 1341–1360 of 14,397 · page 68 of 720
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