Carpal bones, cheerful
Anatomy entertainer Helmut Wicht is back after a long break - with a few cheerful thoughts on those structures that probably give plagued anatomy students the most headaches: the carpal bones.
Eight bones. When times were even harder than they are today, and the anatomists more self-confident and more certain of the importance of their subject, it is said that the grim professor ordered the anxious examinee to reach into a velvet bag containing these little bones. He should identify the bones by touch, name them and then pull them out so that the examiner can check the diagnosis! Alternative horror story: The examiner held one of the bones in his hand, threw it up, caught it deftly and then, cupping the bone politely again, asked the candidate, "Well, which one was it?" Those were the days! Nowadays, anatomists are happy when their candidates know where the bones are in the body and what they are called.
Eight knuckles, the carpal bones. Nota bene, they are not where you would expect them to be, namely in the wrist, but in the hand itself. When we move, raise, lower or wave our hand, these bones hardly move among themselves, rather they all come together opposite the bones of the forearm emotional. Actually, a bone would do the trick here, but nature is prodigal and took care of it. Much to the chagrin of medical students, who now have to learn the names of these eight bones. scaphoid, lunate, triangular, pea, major and minor trapezium, capitate, and hamstring. "And you're lucky," the anatomist shouts after them maliciously, "as a medical doctor! Some animals even have twelve of these bones!"
And so the students sneak away and seek refuge with the popular classics of memo technology: a mnemonic is needed! So they've been murmuring for generations:
"The boat that rode in the moonlight
in the triangle around the pea leg,
Trapeze large, Trapeze small,
the head, it has to be on the hook!"
Anatomy as a Dada poem, it could be by Hans Arp, but it isn't. The author is unknown. It's also slightly creepy: "the head is on the hook" … brr. What's more, the lingua franca of anatomy is still Latin. The Latin names – Os scaphoideum, lunatum, triquetrum, pisiforme, trapezium, trapezoideum, capitatum and hamatum – also have to be memorized. A cheerful trouvaille from the Anglophone anatomy business provides a memory aid:
"Some Lovers Try P ositions T hat T hey C annot H andle …"
The Kama Sutra of Carpal Bones! Kamasutra: This has to do with postures and positions. And anyone who has ever tried to piece together the isolated bones to form a nicely oval "carpus" (because that's what the structure made up of all eight bones is called) knows that the gods put work before pleasure set.
Top row from left to right: big, small trapezium, head and hook leg.
The moon leg really resembles a crescent moon, the pea leg is as small as a pea, the hooked leg is hooked and the triangular leg actually has nothing but triangular faces, so it is one of Plato's ideal bodies: a tetrahedron, a triangular pyramid. But to see a head on the head bone and to identify the scaphoid as a watercraft: It takes a certain amount of imagination. Which the anatomists definitely have, but which immediately got wild when they named the remaining bones: Large and small trapezium – there is no trapezoid. The two used to have different names: large and small polygonal leg. Even better, because they do indeed have many corners. But actually that's also bland and quite unimaginative. From the palm side, the large trapezium looks like a cross. sacrum? No, too bad, the name has already been taken, namely at the lower end of the spine, which doesn't look like a cross, but … but as you can see, a completely different anatomical cord begins here, which will be told at the next opportunity becomes. So stick with the trapezium, for God's sake, even if anatomy gives away a piece of aesthetics here, which it rarely does.
By the way - that's just what a little experiment, a heroic self-experiment here in the Anatomical Institute revealed -, by the way, it's child's play to identify the bones by touch. At least if you've stared at them for hours beforehand, always hoping that the muse might emerge from them, kissing the anatomical glossist and inspiring a purr. But there wasn't a velvet bag to hand, it was a plastic bag from Aldi. So much for the aesthetics of modern anatomy.
Helmut Wicht holds a PhD in biology and is a private lecturer in anatomy at the Dr. Senckenberg Anatomy of the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.
