By David Astle

Copyright theage

Beyond that, no other females. Writing for the BBC, Melbourne GP and writer Leah Kaminsky says: “The truth is, men are all over women’s bodies – dead, white male anatomists. Their names live on eponymously, immortalised like audacious explorers for conquering the geography of the female pelvis as if it were terra nullius.”

Indeed, the female pelvis is a boys’ jamboree, the so-called pudendum (Latin for shame) bearing more men than Malcolm Fraser’s cabinet. From Gabriele Falloppio to Ernst Grafenberg – who allegedly found the G-spot – the fraternity is rife. Danish anatomist Caspar Bartholin the Younger has a mortgage on Bartholin’s gland, attached to the labia, just as the pouch of Douglas, a cavity behind the uterus, enshrines a Scottish obstetrician. Greek zoologist Georgios Papanikolaou, meanwhile, bestowed his syllable onto the modern pap test, a means of seeing if those eponymous boys are behaving.

Not that I’m discrediting these pioneers but did they have to scribble their names on the walls? Wiser to call things what they are, where the Douglas pouch becomes the rectourine sac, as Bartholin could concede his title to the greater vestibular gland. Away from the doodle-fest, the male skew of naming can get equally messy.

Hysteria, say, is tied to its Greek root of womb. The falsehood persists in hysterectomy, which Theresa Larkin, associate professor of medical sciences at the University of Wollongong, argues we should ditch for the clear and neutral alternative of uterectomy (removal of uterus). “Language in medicine impacts patient care and health. It needs to be accurate, clear, free from bias or discrimination, and not disempower a person.”