Quotes About Anatomy

Seventeenth-century surgeon-anatomist William Harvey, famous for discovering the human circulatory system, also deserves fame for being one of few medical men in history so dedicated to his calling that he could dissect his own father and sister.

How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies? It is, of course, possible that I seem strange. You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.

As the number of Inuit who hunt has dwindled, so has the consumption of organs (and other anatomy not available for purchase at the Igloolik Co-op: tendons, blubber, blood, head). I picked up the card labeled Caribou Kidney, Raw. "Who actually eats this?" "I do," said Nirlungayuk.

Yes, men and women eat meals. But they also ingest nutrients. They grind and sculpt them into a moistened bolus that is delivered, via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self-kneading sack of hydrochloric acid and then dumped into a tubular leach field, where it is converted into the most powerful taboo in human history. Lunch is an opening act. M

Space Shuttle toilets have always been mounted on the floor, but you would not call them normal. The original shuttle toilet bowl featured a set of 1,200 rpm Waring blender blades positioned a brief 6 inches below the sitter's anatomy. The macerator would pulp the feces and tissue—meaning, if all went well, the paper, not the scrotal, variety—and fling it to the sides of a holding tank.

phalloplasty—crafting a working penis from other parts of a patient's body—has

Most of us pass our lives never once laying eyes on our organs, the most precious and amazing things we own. Until something goes wrong, we barely give them thought. This seems strange to me. How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies? It is, of course, possible that I seem strange. You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.

The human liver is a boss-looking organ. It's glossy, aerodynamic, Olympian.

No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.

You can't specify what you're used for; you go where there's a need. The majority of willed bodies wind up in the anatomy department. Almost none end up in the English department.

The man had donated his body to science, but, owing to its having been autopsied, science politely declined. An anatomy lab is as choosy as a pedigreed woman seeking love: You can't be too fat or too tall or have any communicable diseases.

Body snatching and other sordid tales from the dawn of human dissection

As one former anatomy instructor said to me, "No one's taking heads home in buckets anymore.

YOU NEVER THINK about the weight of your organs inside you. Your heart is a half-pound clapper hanging off the end of your aorta. Your arms burden your shoulders like buckets on a yoke. The colon uses the uterus as a beanbag chair. Even the weight of your hair imparts a sensation on your scalp. In weightlessness, all this disappears. You organs float inside your torso.* The result is a subtle physical euphoria, an indescribable sense of being freed from something you did not realize was there.

Zugibe's theory holds that the nail went in through jesus' palm at an angle and came out the back side at the wrist.

changes in the teaching of anatomy have nothing to do with cadaver shortages or public opinion about dissection; they have everything to do with time. Despite the immeasurable advances made in medicine over the past century, the material must be covered in the same number of years. Suffice it to say there's a lot less time for dissection than there was in Astley Cooper's day.

But gross anatomy lab is not just about learning anatomy. It is about confronting death.

In attempting to cope with the shortage of cadavers legally available for dissection, instructors at British and early American anatomy schools backed themselves into some unsavory corners.

But students weren't going to pay tuition to learn arm and leg anatomy;

To me, ending up an exhibit in the Mütter Museum or a skeleton in a medical school classroom is like donating money for a park bench after you're gone: a nice thing to do, a little hit of immortality.

Dissection," writes historian Ruth Richardson in Death, Dissection, and the Destitute, "requires in its practitioners the effective suspension or suppression of many normal physical and emotional responses to the wilful mutilation of the body of another human being.

Then there appeared upon the earth a new kind of hominid, which refused to play by the rules. Without any changes in its body, and without any succession of species, it just kept changing its habits. For the first time its technology changed faster than its anatomy. This was an evolutionary novelty, and you are it. When

Grant, then, that men prefer women with relatively wide hips and large breasts. That still does not explain the gaining of fat on breasts and hips; fat breasts do not produce more milk than lean ones of the same size, and fat hips are no further apart than lean ones of the same bone structure. Low thinks women who gained fat in those places may have deceived men into thinking they had milk-full breasts and wide hip-bones. Men fell for it

Women can stand on the Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it's a lie. It's more of a man's world today than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries.