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“Pudendum” isn’t the only questionable term that creeps into the female pelvis. Take out a map of this region and you face an array of unknown landmarks: Alcock’s canal, Douglas pouch, Bartholin’s glands, Fallopian tubes. These are all body parts named after the people who “discovered” them. These are relics from a time when the female body was seen as a terra incognita for great medical minds to explore, explore, and claim.
But such terms may be disappearing from medicine. Scientifically, anatomists disapprove of naming parts after people for several reasons. These terms are unnecessary, offering little information about what a particular body part is actually doing. They are confusing: surnames sometimes compete for the same part (for example, Arantius’ bodies are also known as Morgagni’s nodules), and some surnames adorn multiple parts (Gabriele Falloppio claims a tube , a canal, a muscle and a valve, not to mention a flowering buckwheat plant). Finally, they give the unfortunate and off-putting impression that medicine (and the female pelvis) is still an old boys’ club.
Such terms were officially banned in medicine in 1895. Unofficially, they are everywhere. A recent count has found at least 700 in the human body, most of which derive their names from men. (One of the few women on the body map is Raissa Nitabuch, a 19th-century Russian pathologist whose name is attached to a layer of the maturing placenta called the Nitabuch membrane.) They persist because they are memorable. , recognizable and – to clinicians, at least – familiar. Here’s a guide to some of the best known in the female pelvis, and how you can call them instead.
Fallopian tube
Official name: Fallopian tube
Gabriele Falloppio (1523-1562), Catholic priest and anatomist, noted that these slender trumpet-shaped structures connect the uterus to the ovaries. At the time, scientists still did not know whether women produced eggs or “female sperm.”
Graaf’s follicle
Official name: Ovarian follicle
Regnier de Graaf (1641-1673), a Dutch physician, was the first to observe the mammalian egg – well, almost. What he actually saw were the gnarled protuberances on the ovary now known as follicles, which contain the egg, fluid, and other cells.
Bartholin’s glands
Official name: Large vestibular glands
Caspar Bartholin the Younger (1655-1738), a Danish anatomist, described a pair of glands on either side of the vaginal opening that connect to two pea-sized sacs that produce lubricating fluid.
Douglas pouch
Official name: Recto-uterine pouch
James Douglas (1655-1738), a Scottish obstetrician and physician to Queen Caroline, has the dubious honor of having his name attached to a cul-de-sac of flesh that drapes from the back of the uterus to the rectum .
Skene’s glands
Official name: Para-urethral gland
“I don’t know anything about their physiology,” said Alexander JC Skene (1837-1900), an American gynecologist of Scottish descent, describing a pair of glands that flank the female urethra. The glands secrete a milky fluid that lubricates the area and can help fight urinary tract infections.
G point, Where Gräfenberg location
Official name: internal clitoris (possibly)
In 1950, Ernst Gräfenberg (1881-1957), a German gynecologist, described a particularly sensitive area halfway up the vagina (belly side) and considered it “a primary erotic area, perhaps larger than the clitoris”. Many scientists now believe he was simply describing the root of the clitoris, where erectile tissue meets around the urethra.
Kegel muscles
Official name: Pelvic muscles
The bowl-shaped trampoline of muscles lining the bony pelvis and supporting the bladder, rectum, and uterus is unofficially named after Arnold Kegel (1894-1972), an American gynecologist who recommended exercising them after childbirth. . These muscles are also essential for urination, orgasm and the maintenance of gas.
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