• Question: How do you know where everything is in the body?

    Asked by phoebejones to Laura, Nicola, Norman, Sandra, Thanasis on 11 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Norman Lazarus

      Norman Lazarus answered on 11 Mar 2013:


      Well the best way to find out is to look in a body. From very early times human bodies have been used as a source of knowledge. The science that is concerned with understanding the structure of the human body is called anatomy.This science is concerned not only with structures that you can easily see, eg the heart, the liver, the brain but also with how these organs are arranged at levels we cannot see with the naked eye. To see what cannot be seen by the eye scientists use micrscopes and other instruments.

    • Photo: Nicola Wardrop

      Nicola Wardrop answered on 11 Mar 2013:


      Over the years doctors and scientists have been looking in people’s bodies – sometimes by dissecting dead bodies, and more recently by using modern techniques like x-rays and scans and things. This all builds up to show us what is inside the body and where it is, and now you can get very detailed pictures of it all…a bit like a map of the body! I haven’t worked on any of these things myself – I have dissected some mice and things, but not people, so I have to trust that what I have learnt is correct!

    • Photo: Laura Soul

      Laura Soul answered on 11 Mar 2013:


      Some things you can figure out where they are just by looking and listening, or by how you feel on the inside. For example I bet you know where your heart and lungs are, where lots of your muscles go, and you know where your stomach is when you feel hungry. However the way that we know where everything is, and know it’s position accurately is from lots of people doing research over the years by cutting up bodies, or doing X-rays and other scans.

      One of the first (and most famous) people to find out a lot about where things in the body were was Leonardo da Vinci. He’s more famous for being a painter but actually he had special permission from hospitals to dissect the people that died there and made hundreds of drawings of peoples insides. Because of all the work he, and lots of other people since him, have done if we want to know where anything in the body is we can just go look it up online. Pretty amazing if you think that if someone a few hundred years ago wanted to know they had to cut up a person to look!

    • Photo: Sandra Phinbow

      Sandra Phinbow answered on 11 Mar 2013:


      By getting inside and having a jolly good poke around.

      Right back top Eygyptian and Greek times various organs in the body were recognised, not the purpose perhaps but certainly that they were there and they did something to give us life.

      And then a couple of hundreds years ago scienc and medicine was something that was being studied, and so those students had to learn from something. And there was such a huge demand in Britain for bodies that dead bodies were stolen, or people were killed just so students could cut them up and learn.

      There were also public shows of dissections, so basically people could sit in a room and watch these bodies being cut up. And it was the only way for girls to learn because they weren’t allowed to go to medical school.

      I have worked on human dissection in the past, and although you see it in the books as pictures, it’s all tucked away tidy and nice and neat….then in reality it just seems to be all chucked in all squashed up together. There is order to it, and things are in their rightful place, but it’s a bit squished up.

      This knowledge wrote our text books and this is how we know where everything is in the body – cos someone got in there and had a good rummage around 🙂

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