Power to the tiddies
April 28, 2019 10:34 AM   Subscribe

Anatomically correct diagram of muscle on chest wall takes internet by storm. Internet is simultaneously awed and, disappointingly but unsurprisingly, disgusted. Other good reflections below the fold.

Guardian writer explains why it’s such a shock to see the inside of a woman’s body and how this impacts disparities in health and medicine.

And Dr. Sarah Taber explains why, exactly, these milk ducts do belong on a diagram of the chest’s muscles. (And why breasts are amazing, in case you were having any doubts).
posted by stillmoving (29 comments total) 32 users marked this as a favorite
 
It occurs to me that I never before has seen this part of human anatomy detailed. Cool.

As much as an 'aha' moment, as when I first saw skinned men at one of those travelling anatomical exhibitions: without the scrotum the testes hang dramatically to the sides.
posted by bouvin at 10:58 AM on April 28, 2019 [5 favorites]


Highlighting this link from an article in the OP: The case for testing drugs on pregnant women

I'd be curious to read those ethical guidelines when they come out. I'm convinced that there's tremendous cost to not testing drugs on pregnant women, but I also don't know how one would do it.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 11:00 AM on April 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


Breasts are almost always depicted as existing for the pleasure of men. It's wild how revolutionary it always feels to depict them in literally any other way.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:16 AM on April 28, 2019 [23 favorites]


Not actually correct.
posted by Segundus at 11:33 AM on April 28, 2019 [57 favorites]


The original picture seems to have come from a sketchy ipad app. When I look at the developer's other apps on itunes, I see mostly unlicensed Peppa Pig ripoffs.

Based on the science and medical folk going back and forth on my FB timeline, the argument about whether or not the ducts belong on a muscle diagram can get pretty nitpicky. If the diagram is supposed to be showing *skeletal* muscle, then Dr Taber's point about there being smooth muscle tissue doesn't really apply. And not all medical professionals seem to agree on it being smooth muscle tissue - a pathologist on my FB timeline says they are really "Myoepithelial cells, so contractile cells with some similarities to smooth muscle." What everyone in the thread *did* agree on is that our treatment of male bodies as default is a big problem.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 11:56 AM on April 28, 2019


Not actually correct.

definitely take terminology corrections from someone whose piece already has its own editorial correction attached to it and offers such statements as "the entire boob is actually a mammary gland."

she is right that lobes aren't ducts and that people were accidentally interchanging the two. she is also right that the diagram is drawn in the simplifying style of non-specialist anatomical diagrams the world over, for legibility; this is what we have anatomical drawings for and why we bother to use them at all, instead of just looking at photographs. she is right that you can draw the breast from other perspectives, such as from the side, and with other structures included. she is not right that the drawing is scary, made up, or incorrect other than as many anatomical drawings for a lay audience are simplified and deliberately incomplete.
posted by queenofbithynia at 11:58 AM on April 28, 2019 [20 favorites]


This is like the Beau Brummel thing all over again.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 2:03 PM on April 28, 2019 [7 favorites]


The only thing I thought when I saw it on Twitter was, I'm pretty sure the milk ducts aren't actually muscles? So of course it's usually not included in an anatomy book image of the muscular system. I took anatomy in high school and am more familiar with milk ducts being included alongside other diagrams of primary/secondary sex characteristics.

Also FYI... males also have nipples and milk ducts, they're just smaller. Also they can lactate with enough stimulation. So, if they're not usually shown on the male muscle figure, why would it be on the female?

Though perhaps it is true that anatomy images tend to feature male bodies by default, and even if they don't many will assume the images to be male anyway because humans actually look very androgynous when you take away our clothing, hair, skin, fat etc.
posted by picklenickle at 2:47 PM on April 28, 2019


I'm pretty sure the milk ducts aren't actually muscles?

If you bother to read the last link in the fine post here, I'm pretty sure you'll learn something.
posted by Nelson at 2:56 PM on April 28, 2019 [6 favorites]


*grabs chest* Nooooooooooooo!
posted by loquacious at 3:20 PM on April 28, 2019


Uhh, I haven't breastfed my kid in a couple of years and just had painful let-down from looking at that picture.
posted by stowaway at 3:37 PM on April 28, 2019 [7 favorites]


I think, for me, it's because shock images that went around the internet in the early 2000s gave me a fear of holes, which kind of mutated into a fear/disgust towards some repeating patterns you see in nature -- honeycombs, stuff like that. So the repeating shape + human body + novelty sort of shades into body horror for me even though it's just natural. (And it's only novel to me because of misogyny. And of course even though I'm a woman I have internalized misogyny.) But it's also cool and interesting?
posted by pelvicsorcery at 4:03 PM on April 28, 2019


many people online seemed to find the picture hard to swallow.
Ah, BBC.
posted by doctornemo at 5:02 PM on April 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


I think people realizing that they have no idea what's inside a boob is the origin of "why is this the first time I'm seeing it" is more to the point than "this muscle stuff should have been on the muscle diagram this whole time" . What kind of muscle it is and needs to be to be included with other muscles seems to be missing the point which is that I learned a lot about how penises work in health class but this random image is the first I'm hearing that nipples have muscles too, whatever type of muscle it is. The bigger picture is way more interesting to me than nitpicking about only one kind of muscle can be in one drawing.
posted by bleep at 10:54 PM on April 28, 2019 [9 favorites]


You know where these beautiful boob-flowers would have been SUPER HELPFUL to have been seen?

On the bazillion breast exam posters you see in health offices everywhere. When I feel my breasts, I feel lumps, but NO self-examination picture that I've ever seen has actually had the anatomy displayed so that I can have a sense of what should feel normal and what shouldn't. The only think I've ever been shown is diagrams of perfectly pert breasts being padded down by a thin, white drawing of a woman.

So it's not just "I haven't seen this in my anatomy books" - I imagine this kind of diagram could also have been useful for breast cancer self-examination how-to.

Seriously the history of medicine generally and the history of obstetrics specifically is filled with horrors, flagrant abuse and sexism. I wish we could have a do-over where women's bodies were treated and studied with the same dignity as those of men.
posted by Dressed to Kill at 5:03 AM on April 29, 2019 [16 favorites]


Where do they keep the sand?
posted by Guy Smiley at 7:34 AM on April 29, 2019 [3 favorites]


At first I was vaguely horrified, but then I sustained myself through an uncomfortable bra and the recent Avengers movie by telling myself how impressive it was that I had all of that up there being contained and now I embrace all those little baby mice milk ducts in their glory.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 8:18 AM on April 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


Yeah, this is absolutely not accurate and is based on an 19th century misunderstanding of where milk is stored -- not in the ducts or lobes, but in the tissue surrounding them. This article contains an image of actual milk ducts captured by injecting colored wax into a cadaver, and the lobes don't change size or shape when lactating. It's like someone set out to produce the most trypophobia-inducing image of a breast without even momentarily checking for accuracy.
posted by chronostachyon at 9:04 AM on April 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


Yeah, no, the image you posted is absolutely a picture of the exact 19th-century misunderstanding you're complaining about. Artist’s representation of the ductalsystem of a cadaver injected with colouredwax (Cooper, 1840). 1840. Artist's representation.
posted by Don Pepino at 9:45 AM on April 29, 2019


many people online seemed to find the picture hard to swallow.
Ah, BBC.


I see what you did there.
posted by flabdablet at 10:12 AM on April 29, 2019


Also FYI... males also have nipples and milk ducts, they're just smaller. Also they can lactate with enough stimulation.

"I have nipples, Greg, can you milk me?"
posted by e1c at 12:01 PM on April 29, 2019


Thanks to all the people shouting "No this is not what breasts look like" and "Yes this actually is what breasts look like" I have learned that nobody, including myself, has much clue what actual breast anatomy is. And this, despite me devoting a significant portion of my adult life to staring at them.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 1:02 PM on April 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


What mystifies me is why anybody would think they'd know what breasts look like inside unless they'd completed gross anatomy. Do you have a working mental map of your own scrotum under the skin? Do you know where your spleen is in relation to your pancreas? Why is that meatflower image more grody than that wax-filled-cadaver-ducts image? It's all completely gnarly because it's guts.
posted by Don Pepino at 1:14 PM on April 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


All I know is I can’t look at the posted image without thinking it looks like two radial engines circa 1920 attached to a chest. Which is a hella hard image to get out of my head.......let alone the engine noises I’m trying not make at the same time.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 4:25 PM on April 29, 2019


I would really appreciate some more sources on where this muscle diagram is coming from. It's obviously not just the glands, because as nursing women know, those glands are not neat little clusters around the nipple but can go back as far as the armpit (very palpable as milk comes in or when a duct is clogged). Is it that the glands only have muscle at the very ends? Why can I only find this one weird illustration instead of any actual photos from a dissection, or indeed more illustrations than just this one?
posted by Cozybee at 6:20 PM on April 29, 2019 [2 favorites]


As an arts major who just took the basic required science classes, in high school and college, I'd never even realized I wasn't seeing them. I guess I just figured that we had extra fatty tissue on top of the same default muscle wall in the textbooks and worksheets. Perhaps because I never had kids I never really thought that through ...

Anyway I went looking for other sources that are unrelated to the viral post and came up with Cleveland Clinic and WebMD.
posted by bunderful at 5:20 AM on April 30, 2019 [3 favorites]


People are finding this gross? Really?

When anyone whose ever seen an anatomical diagram of a scrotum (Virtually everyone I know) has been subjected to images of what appears to be a malignant growth that should be addressed with scalpel and sutures immediately lest its influence spread.

Of course, I might be prejudiced.
posted by allium cepa at 2:38 PM on May 1, 2019


I agree it is a bit of an odd sensation and a poorly referenced/resourced illustration. I guess I shared as I was just more surprised and disappointed by how many people found it repulsive, and I liked the discussion it brought up about the different needs of women not served by science. I mean, we’re happy to look at bra ads and naked boobs and all that, and BodyWorlds is celebrated as a marvel, but suddenly a (potentially inaccurate) diagram is freaking people out? Boo.
posted by stillmoving at 5:39 PM on May 2, 2019 [1 favorite]


most muscle diagrams are of skeletal muscle.

Dr. Sarah Taber defends the inclusion of the ducts because they're smooth muscle.
But note that muscle diagrams also do not, generally, include the smooth muscle from male genitalia (eg Cremaster muscle, vas deferens)-- this is the only other example I caould think of for smooth muscle located outside of the skeletal muscle.
posted by Cozybee at 11:23 AM on May 4, 2019


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