You aren’t anatomy.
Are you ready for a truth bomb? You aren’t anatomy. Not until you’re dead, and unless you plan to donate your body to science you’ll never be anatomy.
Anatomy literally means, ‘to cut up.’ Temnein=to cut, tomia=cutting, ana=up.
Anatomy is a model. It’s a model of distinguishable parts within the body that can be cut out, named, and counted. We can learn a lot about the body through models, but models are maps and maps aren’t terrain.
It’s not a reliable model either. Talk to an anatomist and they’ll tell you that no two bodies are the same. Some have muscles that others don’t, and they all have unique presentations.
Beyond that, muscles are taken off of a spherical surface and placed on a flat one. We can only learn so much through this artifact of dissection.
Going even further, Euclidean math, the math of biomechanics (the science that explains how these now disconnected bits move in space as a body) is out of its jurisdiction being all about flat spaces - but they didn’t have geometrical framework options like geodesic, hyperbolic, or spherical geometry back in the days of Descartes and Borelli when the model that’s still in the mainstream was being birthed.
In the traditional anatomical model, the flossy connective tissue was discarded in order to see and access the muscles and bones, and was thought to be inert packing tissue. That was the case for hundreds of years.
It’s only in recent decades that anatomists and researchers are looking into the connective tissue itself and have found that it plays several crucial roles in movement, morphology (our shape), intero/extero/proprioception, inter-systemic communication, and is becoming known as our richest sensory organ with over 250 million sensory nerves. The 2021 Nobel Prize Laureates for Physiology or Medicine went to “discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch.” It didn’t go to anything COVID related, it went to fascia research.
What’s missing from anatomy is its sentient architecture (credit to Joanne Avison for that poetry), the fascia. But then if it were all united it wouldn’t be anatomy anymore. It would be living physiology, which, I just learned, comes from ‘study of nature’ etymologically. That feels more like what I want to teach.