The controversial and very male history of naming body parts

Australia Broadcast Center

5 hours ago

Take a look at your body.
All the parts you can see, as well as all those on the inside, have been given a name at some point in history.
There are plenty of descriptive, fairly innocuous names. But many parts are named after people. The vast majority of these are men, whose identities are invisibly stamped on every human.
This includes female body parts — even the G in G spot pays tribute to a man.
"There are hundreds and hundreds of dead old white men living inside us," Adam Taor, author of Bodypedia: A Brief Compendium of Human Anatomical Curiosities, tells ABC Radio National's Late Night Live.
But some doctors believe these names need to be retired, with more anatomically descriptive terms used instead.
"The world has changed," says Nisha Khot, the president-elect of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.
"So I think it's time to change the language that we use."
Humans began carving up cadavers and taking a look at what's inside in ancient times.
And the basic rule for generations of researchers was "name what you see".
A leg bone looked like a flute, so it was given the Latin word for the musical instrument, the 'tibia'. Then there's the patella or the kneecap, which means 'little pan' in Latin.
A less creative example is an unusually shaped bone in our pelvis called the innominate, which is Latin for 'unnamed'. That's because it doesn't look like anything else.
Dr Taor describes the process as "like Pictionary but with a lot more blood on the floor".
But as time went on, naming conventions became less descriptive and more personal.
"Often body parts were named after people who discovered them … or doctors who were good at putting their name forward so that they got their name attached to bits of the body," Dr Taor says.
As Dr Khot sums up: "It was a way of making sure that their memory stayed alive."
Over more recent centuries, there were leaps and bounds in European anatomical study. And this was very much a boy's club.
"It was men who did all of the study of the human body … Women rarely got a look in," Dr Khot says.
"So that's the reason most body parts were named after men."
One review looked at 700 body parts that were eponyms, or named after people.
There were 432 people's names around the body (as some names are connected to multiple parts). Of these, 424 were men. The rest consisted of five gods, a king, a hero and just one woman.
Raissa Nitabuch was a little-known 19th century Russian pathologist who studied the placenta. The Nitabuch layer — a layer between the uterus and the placenta — is named after her.
But, as Dr Khot points out, it's not exactly a major body part: "You can only see it if you look under a microscope."
The study also found the average year of eponymous term attribution was 1847, meaning much of our body reflects the medical world of the mid-19th century.
Even when it comes to a woman's reproductive parts, "dead men dominate living women", according to Dr Taor.
Take the fallopian tubes. They're named after 16th-century Italian priest-turned-anatomist Gabriele Falloppio (who is also the eponym for the fallopian canal and fallopian hiatus).
Once you start looking, there are male names all around the female pelvis. From the pouch of Douglas (a Scottish surgeon) to Skene's glands (a Scottish gynaecologist) and Bartholin's glands (a Danish anatomist).
The G in G spot is named after German-born gynaecologist Ernst Gräfenberg.
"I really can't see why we should use those names for [parts] that are very specific to women … It makes me feel uncomfortable," Dr Khot says.
The pudendal nerves, which take sensations from male and female genitalia to the brain, is a less gendered term but still reflects a cultural bias.
It comes from the Latin word 'pudere', meaning to be ashamed.
"I think that says something about the attitude of the male doctors who name these things. No wonder that people feel shame about their genitals … when it's hardwired into us," Dr Taor says.
Pudendum has also been a term for genitalia — especially women's. But due to this connection with shame, its use has been curbed.
The domination of dead men's names for body parts isn't the only issue; some of them have problematic backgrounds and connections.
For example, within your heart is a collection of muscle cells called the bundle of His, named after the Swiss-born anatomist Wilhelm His Jr who discovered it in 1893.
And according to Dr Taor: "Every beat of your heart is a memorial to a prominent pre-World War II Berlin doctor who helped legitimise Nazi atrocities."
His became the rector of the University of Berlin in the 1920s and was a prominent advocate of eugenics, a pseudoscience involving "cleansing" the gene pool to create a genetically superior race.
The Nazis later used eugenics — what they called 'rassenhygiene' or racial hygiene — to justify forced sterilisations, murder and genocide.
Then there's John Hunter. He was a superstar Scottish surgeon-anatomist in the 18th century. Hunter's canal in our thigh carries his name.
Dr Taor calls Hunter "the father of scientific surgery … one of the most influential surgeons who ever lived".
But Hunter was also a keen collector of oddities and a bit "creepy", Dr Taor explains.
He infamously stole the body of Charles Byrne, known as the "Irish Giant" for standing 2.31 metres tall, and put him on display. This was very much against Byrne's wishes before he died.
Most eponymous anatomical terms also have more technical names. For example, Hunter's canal is also the adductor canal.
There has been a shift towards using these terms, but in many cases, the Falloppio and Douglas varieties still dominate medical, and therefore cultural, vernacular.
Dr Khot wants a more concerted effort of change, particularly for women's body parts and also if the man in question is a "troubling" figure.
"The description of using somebody's name doesn't tell you what the body part is … My view is that we should call things what they are anatomically," she says.
As one example, Dr Khot advocates the use of uterine tubes rather than fallopian tubes.
And she says similar changes have been made elsewhere in this space, like for various medical conditions that affect women.
She points to Stein-Leventhal syndrome, originally named after American gynaecologists Irving Stein and Michael Leventhal, which is now called polycystic ovarian syndrome, also known as PCOS.
"I'm not saying we should erase history … The majority of these men did good things. They described anatomy, which has helped us grow science and grow healthcare," Dr Khot says.
"But we have more women studying [medicine] and more women doctors … So I think it's time to change the language that we have used."