“This is the only term which has a moral context to it,” he said. But it also, I think, is both scientifically and biologically inappropriate.” As a general rule, anatomical terms are supposed to be informative and descriptive. It wasn’t just the inherent sexism of the term, he said: “There is an element of that, there’s no question about it.
One anatomist added that “it’s interesting where it comes from, but it’s established terminology now.” In 2016, the pair asked hundreds of medical students and anatomists whether they had any concerns about the fact that the word “pudendal” stemmed from “to be ashamed.” Most did not. Today, the word appears in almost every medical textbook, including recent editions of “ Gray’s Anatomy,” “ Williams Obstetrics,” and “ Comprehensive Gynecology.” It would later be simplified to “pudendum” and used as a slightly more formal synonym for vulva. But 60 years later, only the “pudendum femininum” - the female shame part - was still listed. In 1895, anatomy officially recognized a pudendal region in both men and women. “If these parts of the pudendum had not been endowed with such an exquisite sensitivity to pleasure,” he wrote, “no woman would be willing to take upon herself the irksome nine-months-long business of gestation, the painful and often fatal process of expelling the fetus, and the worrisome and care-ridden task of raising children.” (Also, recall the dearth of female corpses.)Ī century later, a Dutch anatomist named Regnier de Graaf highlighted the role of the clitoris in female sexuality. In 1543, the word made an appearance alongside an odd illustration in an anatomical atlas by Andreas Vesalius, a Flemish physician sometimes called the “father of modern anatomy.” The image, although labeled a human uterus, looks unmistakably like a penis, but with a tuft of curly pubic hair near the head, reflecting the idea that women were just men with imperfect, internal body parts. But it was women to whom the shame stuck. First-century Roman writers used “ pudendum” to mean the genitals of men, women and animals. It is used to diagnose and treat certain forms of pelvic pain, perform vulval and vaginal surgeries and, though less common than the epidural, alleviate the pain of second-stage labor.
Anyone who has gone to medical school has probably learned how to perform a pudendal block, a numbing injection at the site of the pudendal nerve.
“You just don’t really think about that kind of thing.” “I never really gave it a second thought,” he said. That included her anatomy professor, Doug Broadfield, who had been showing the pudendal canal, nerve and artery to students for 14 years. Draper was that this one had made it through 500 years of revisions and updates - and virtually no one knew what it meant. Little wonder, then, that some words might sound a little off to modern ears. At the time it was a stretch to find a female corpse, let alone a female anatomist.
There was no equivalent word for male genitals.Īnatomy as a science had its start in 16th-century Italy, as the purview of learned men. When her teacher handed her a copy of the “Terminologia Anatomica,” the international dictionary of anatomical terms, she learned that the Latin term for the vulva - including the inner and outer labia, the clitoris and the pubic mound - was pudendum. Draper noted: “I was like, What? Excuse me?” The term derived from the Latin verb pudere: to be ashamed. Then one day she looked up the pudendal nerve, which provides sensation to the vagina and vulva, or outer female genitalia. The flexor carpi ulnaris, for instance, is a muscle in the forearm that bends the wrist - exactly as its name suggests. She could look up the Latin term for almost any body part and get an idea of where it was and what it did. As a first-year medical student at the University of Miami, she found the language clear, precise, functional.
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