Clitoris

What we know so far

Kevin Bottomley
Human Parts

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Dew drips off a leaf
Photo by Maxence Pira on Unsplash

Enveloped in the folds of this article you shall find what you are looking for.

Here’s something: we recently discovered two unknown organs in the body. Who would have thunk it? Elusive is not a word you’d think associated with the organs of the human body. After hundreds of years of dissecting corpses — probing, prodding, poking, moving this aside, lifting, separating this from that, measuring, illustrating, and discussing the human body — these two organs — the mesentery and the interstitium — had somehow eluded us.

The mesentery, discovered in 2011, is a membrane that attaches the intestine to the stomach and holds it in place. Leonardo da Vinci, whom I think we can all agree was before his time, drew it as a contiguous organ, but latter-day investigators fragmented the structure — until a novel electron microscope determined it to be all of a piece; thus, an organ.

The interstitium, discovered in 2018, is even sneakier. It’s a fluid-filled network running through the body that collapses when prepared for microscope slides, which is why it went unnoticed until we figured out a way to peer into living tissue.

I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised. We didn’t even know where babies came from until the late 1800s, for God’s sake, when we discovered through the microscope that women had eggs…

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