History
The thymus was known to the ancient Greeks, and its name comes from the Greek word θυμός (thumos), meaning "anger", or "heart, soul, desire, life", possibly because of its location in the chest, near where emotions are subjectively felt; or else the name comes from the herb thyme (also in Greek θύμος or θυμάρι), which became the name for a "warty excrescence", possibly due to its resemblance to a bunch of thyme.
Galen was the first to note that the size of the organ changed over the duration of a person's life.
Due to the large numbers of apoptotic lymphocytes, the thymus was originally dismissed as a "lymphocyte graveyard", without functional importance. The importance of the thymus in the immune system was discovered in 1961 by Jacques Miller, by surgically removing the thymus from three day old mice, and observing the subsequent deficiency in a lymphocyte population, subsequently named T-cells after the organ of their origin. Recently, advances in immunology have allowed the function of the thymus in T-cell maturation to be more fully understood.
Read more about this topic: Thymus
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