She is a reasonable soul

Robert Boyle (1627-1691) once opined that,

'It is highly dishonourable for a Reasonable Soul to live in so Divinely built a Mansion as the Body she* resides in, altogether unacquainted with the exquisite Structure of it.'

Various dates for the quotation have been cited. It is not the dating but the sentiment that matters. Where found quoted, it is an encouragement to find out what we are made of. How is it, Boyle in effect asks, that people can go through life without finding out about their very substance and how it is organised? In a world where people are seemingly so 'health conscious,' one might have expected much more desire to find out.

Indeed, Boyle’s sentiments were independently echoed by the British physiologist A.V. Hill (1886-1977) in the Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture, ‘Biology in Education and Human Life,’ given at Newnham College, Cambridge, on Nov. 22, 1930.

    (This lecture is available online at: Nature 127, 19-26 (3 January 1931) | doi:10.1038/127019a0 https://www.nature.com/articles/127019a0)

Following that lecture and its publication, Hill wrote to Nature the following brief letter:

Biology in Education and Human Life

In my Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture (NATURE, Jan. 3, 1931) I protested that “those should be regarded as lacking education who are altogether ignorant of the nature of living things” (p. 21). Mr. A. D. Ritchie has directed my attention to a sentence of Robert Boyle’s, who about two and a half centuries ago, in much more beautiful words than mine, urged similarly that it is “highly dishonourable for a reasonable soul to live in so divinely built a mansion as the body she resides in altogether unacquainted with the exquisite structure of it”.

    (This is also available online at: Nature 127, 237-237 (14 February 1931) | doi:10.1038/127237c0 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v127/n3198/abs/127237c0.html)

* NB Boyle refers to his soul as 'she.' This is because the Greek word for soul, ψυχή (pronounced 'psoo-kay'—and from which we get 'psyche'), is linguistically a first declension noun with feminine gender (not ‘female sex'—even though the terms 'gender' and 'sex' are nowadays often used interchangeably).

More about the anus

Something else you won’t read in standard textbooks or hear in those lectures where politeness is deemed more important than understanding concerns what happens to the anus immediately following defecation. Again, this information was provided by one of my old professors* (the one mentioned in a previous post on a similar topic).

It transpires that the process of defaecation is not completely over once the faeces have left the body. The muscles around the anus, having opened, proceed to close but remain active for a brief period of time. (I’m afraid that I don’t know exactly how long this lasts, but it would appear to be for only a matter of minutes.)

As described by my old professor, these muscles tend to ‘writhe.’ That is, they move in a twisting, even worm-like fashion. This may simply be a way of their repositioning themselves back into a stable (comfortable?) arrangement until defecation takes place again. This writhing may have the effect of helping to clear the anal canal of any remaining faeces and should (Prof. advocated) be allowed sufficient time to complete the process.

Although this may not happen every time, allowing a period of relaxation after the main act of defecation sometimes results in small bits of faeces falling from the anus after a few minutes without any extra effort.

* NB All of my ‘old’ professors are now ‘late’ professors. I’ve read the obituaries. I hope, though, that in reporting what I can remember them saying, something survives.

More Latin / Muscular Latin

The anatomical use of Latin has figured in a number of posts—not least 'Saying Grace in Latin' with its addendum.

In that post I referred to my Anatomical Wordbook (pp. 14-21), where a list of Latin terms that appear in the names of muscles has been collected. To quote from the preface to that section:

Elements of a muscle's action, position, shape etc. are often implied by its name. In order to help facilitate translation of a muscle name into English the following list of words applied to muscles and their meanings is given. By chaining together the meanings of each word in the muscle's name and then reordering them where appropriate, a more readily remembered description of the muscle is obtained e.g. flexor digitorum superficialis renders Flexor/Of the fingers/Superficial. Upon reordering, the muscle name reads: The superficial flexor of the fingers'.

That list can now be viewed/downloaded using the hyperlink below.

From An Anatomical Wordbook: Muscle Latin.

Eponyms 1a

This post is by way of a footnote to a post made a month ago entitled simply Eponyms 1. (Hence this is Eponyms 1a.)

I was able to find a copy of the standard work on the subject of anatomical eponyms online. The work is Jessie Dobson's Anatomical Eponyms. Its full title is:

Anatomical Eponyms. Being a Biographical Dictionary of those Anatomists whose Names have become Incorporated into Anatomical Nomenclature, with Definitions of the Structures to which their Names have been Attached and References to the Works in which they are Described

This was originally published in 1945, but a scanned copy of the second edition (1962) can be found at Archive.org. (Link to download.)