Gutbread

Having spent many years in the slaughterhouse, I can perhaps enlighten your correspondent as to what sweetbreads are. The "throat-bread" is undoubtedly the thyroid, and the "gut-bread" the pancreas. […] But I was informed that the gut-bread, i.e., the sweetbread of dictionaries and doctors, is "given to paupers or thrown away."

(3) The throat bread (thyroid gland) (4) The heart bread (thymus gland) Biggr } These form a "set" of sweetbreads. (5) The gut bread (pancreas)

The feeding of raw pancreas has been advocated and claimed to be effective but the difficulty of ensuring a regular supply of fresh gutbreads, quite apart from doubts as to the effect of gastric digestion, makes this treatment of dubious value.

Gerrard discloses that the pancreas is sometimes substituted for sweetbread and is referred to as gutbread in English slaughter houses.

The brownish-yellow lobulated pancreas is called ‘gut bread’ or ‘stomach sweetbread’ and weighs approximately 170 g in market-weight beef animals and 85 g in sheep and pigs.

The summarized data from various states show that in the most contaminated regions the incidence rate of gut-bread cancer rose ten times during 1991–1994 if compared with the period of 1986–1990 (Radiation level..., 2000, par. 258, p. 52).

A case report from Ernest Neve, senior surgeon at the Kashmir Mission Hospital, provided the final item of support for raw gland therapy. […] Cunningham Affleck, an Edinburgh physician, shared Neve's frustration with the idiosyncrasies of butchers and slaughterhouse workers. He discovered that they generally supplied thymus or thyroid glands in place of pancreas when asked for ‘sweetbreads’. It was necessary, he cautioned, to specify ‘long bread’ or ‘gut bread’ in order to receive pancreas. Those who had found pancreas unpleasant had probably been supplied with the wrong organ, for true pancreas was ‘quite pleasant and palatable’.