I know there was a thread covering this but I am going to bring it up again about the image that is of the Fallopian tubes. I happen to be on a site that had this as just a snippet of the picture with no text and said hey that looks familiar. I showed to a friend that stopped by and they again said the same thing. I am sure the VM was written by a woman or women, for herbs, medicines, perfumes, astrology, women’s health, spiritual health.
I have to admit, first time I saw it, that's exactly what it looked like to me.
Another page looks like it is covering the stomach to the pancreas the corn shaped item to the kidneys to the bladder and intestines
This does come up regularly, and indeed you will find many people who agree.
Granted, many of these shapes have an organic quality to them. As I've said elsewhere though, I believe it is a fallacy to take the intention of this image as depicting the female reproductive system. We recognise it because the shape is familiar from the textbook image.
But medieval people did not have such an image. Look up how they drew the womb in medieval manuscripts, it's more like a bottle with a small person inside.
Then the discussion usually turns towards how they could have seen the real organs in an execution or whatnot. But again, the real organs would not have this distinct shape.
They knew there was a baby-bag in the woman's body, but that's about it. The comparison with the threefold structure we know now is anachronistic, in my opinion.
In the Middle Ages, they believed that the mammary glands were connected to the uterus by tubes, so hanging the teats underneath the "womb" in the middle would not be out of line with what they believed (that the two were physically connected).
But the crucial part here is the ovaries on both sides. How did they envision those?
I think they must have had autopsies and or have tried surgery. This was now mid 1400’s or do. People knew what was inside folks due to war or accidents by now. I will have to check it out. I think whomever wrote this my personal thoughts was like a wise woman or women of a very small group of folks or monestary or nunnery.
Butchers in the marketplaces were always standing there carving up animals and some people butchered their own pigs and goats.
I'm sure many were familiar with anatomy in the larger sense, even if they didn't get the details right. The one part they apparently had particular difficulty with was blood vessels. They knew they were there (lots of vein man drawings), but not exactly how they traversed the body.
Okay, but what did they actually think about ovaries? I'm ready to have my objections dismissed, but the burden of proof is with those who claim that a medieval person knowingly drew a uterus with ovaries here.
Also, I agree they might be teats in a way (the three dangly things) but their number would suggest we're not looking at human anatomy.
When I was trying to find a picture of the Fallopian tubes there were many with fibroids. I thought maybe that is what they could be. If you are a woman you are well aware that one ovary is bigger than the other and that one side gives you more trouble than the other during cramps. Fibroids also act up sometimes.