This has been bugging me since June of last year, and as much as I’ve been trying to ignore it, it keeps clawing it’s way back…
“A woman’s body is a man’s world. Just ask an anatomist…”
As I read this opinion piece red flags began waving all over the place.
From Fallopian tubes to the G-spot, long-dead men have left their mark on women’s anatomy. It’s time to turf them out, says Adam Taor
Yep, it doesn’t read like some important insight into science. Oooops,
NewScientist (14 June 2025; paywall)
It reads as a tired paean to the latest ideology on the street.
Inside a woman, there is a veritable frat club of distinguished gentlemen, in the form of anatomical eponyms: body parts named after people, almost exclusively long-dead men.
A review of 700 body parts named after 432 people found 424 were male physicians. The eight eponyms that weren’t male physicians comprised five gods, a king, a hero and just one woman: Raissa Nitabuch, a 19th-century Russian pathologist whose name is attached to a layer where the placenta separates from the uterus wall after delivery of a baby.
This bodily patriarchy isn’t surprising, given the average date the parts were named was 1847, when women didn’t get much of a look-in on our innards. Including women’s reproductive real estate, where men particularly hold sway.
And everyone involved, women, surgeons, gynecologists, any other relevant specialists, were acutely aware of these facts.
Yes?
To tell the truth, I wasn’t, but I’m an obsolete software engineer who happens to read too much. How about the rest? History buffs, the lot of them?
I’m doubting it.
OK, so how is this going to benefit anyone in these groups, even including those who know the dreadful truth and are emotionally devastated at the lack of female eponyms associated with female genitals?
In other words, is there a connection between truly arbitrary labels we attach to body parts and our facility in using and repairing them? I phrase it this way as Taor has a bit on pudendum, a Latin word meaning to be ashamed and applied to genitalia:
For hundreds of years, pudendum applied equally to women’s and men’s external genitalia. With time, men unburdened themselves of the label, leaving the naming and shaming especially for women.
However, that doesn’t apply to most other parts. Hell, unsurprisingly I didn’t know fallopian tubes are named after Gabriele Falloppio, and if I had, I’d have taken Gabriele to be female associated. Darn Catholic priests.
Back to the point, does this existence, knowledge, or lack thereof, affect the performance of the physicians delivering the needed care? Will changing the names help improve the care delivered to minorities?
Where’s the study proving it?
There’s no such citation. It’s all soft handwaving that strikes me as something written to please an outraged minority. And if we did change the names?
We’d deliver inferior care simply because these names are long-established, and medical professionals have limited time to be re-educated in the latest intellectual trend.
There. Now I can delete that damn tab.
