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“Pudendum” isn’t the only questionable term lurking in the female pelvis. Map this area and you are faced with a series of unfamiliar landmarks: Alcock’s duct, Douglas pouch, Bartholin’s glands, fallopian tubes. These are all body parts named in honor of the people who are thought to have “discovered” them. They are relics from a time when the female body was considered terra incognita for the great medical minds to explore, spy on, and demand.

But such terms can be on the way out medicine. Scientifically, anatomists do not like to name parts by people’s names. a few reasons. These terms are useless and offer little information about what any body part actually does. They are confusing: surnames sometimes compete for the same portion (for example, the bodies of Arantius are also known as Morgagni’s nodules), and some surnames adorn more than one place (Gabriele Falloppio claims a tube, a conduit, a muscle). and a valve, not to mention a flowering buckwheat plant). Finally, they give the unfortunate, repulsive impression that medicine (and the female pelvis) is still an old men’s club.

Such terms were officially banned in medicine in 1895. everywhere. A last issue At least 700 have been found in the human body, and most of them are named after men. (One of the few women in the body chart Raissa Nitabuch, a 19th-century Russian pathologist whose name is attached to the maturing placental layer called the Nitabuch membrane.) They are memorable, recognizable, and at least because they are familiar to clinicians, they persist. Here is a guide to some of the better known ones in the female pelvis and what you can call it instead.

fallopian tube

Official name: uterine tube

Gabriele Falloppio (1523-1562), a Catholic priest and anatomist, noted that these thin, trumpet-shaped structures connect the uterus to the ovaries. At the time, scientists were still unclear as to whether women produced eggs or “female sperm.”

Graafian follicle

Official name: ovarian follicle

Regnier de Graaf (1641-1673), a Dutch physician, was the first to observe the mammalian egg – almost. What he actually saw were tuberous projections on the ovary, now known as follicles, containing eggs, fluid, and other cells.

Bartholin glands

Official name: larger vestibular glands

Caspar Bartholin the Younger (1655-1738), a Danish anatomist, described a pair of glands attached to two pea-sized sacs on either side of the vaginal opening, forming a lubricating fluid.

Douglas Pouch

Official name: rectouterine pouch

James Douglas (1655-1738), a Scottish obstetrician and physician to Queen Caroline, has the dubious honor of affixing his name to a fleshy cul-de-sac that runs from the back of the womb to the rectum.

Skene cloths

Official name: paraurethral gland

“I don’t know anything about their physiology,” said Alexander JC Skene (1837-1900), a Scottish-American gynecologist, after describing a pair of glands surrounding the female urethra. The glands secrete a milky fluid that lubricates the area and can help protect against urinary tract infections.

G point, or Grafenberg point

Official name: internal clitoris (possibly)

In 1950, Ernst Gräfenberg (1881-1957), a German gynecologist, identified a particularly sensitive area in the half of the vagina (on the navel side) and described it as “the primary erotic zone, perhaps more important than the clitoris.” Many scientists now think it simply describes the root of the clitoris, where the erectile tissues meet around the urethra.

kegel muscles

Official name: pelvic floor muscles

The bowl-shaped trampoline of muscles that covers the bony pelvis and supports the bladder, rectum, and uterus is unofficially named after Arnold Kegel (1894-1972), an American gynecologist who recommended exercise after childbirth. These muscles are also vital for urination, orgasm and gas retention.