This is undeniably hilarious, but if you've ever seen actual dissection photos or videos of surgery, you kinda recognize that good anatomical drawings required a lot of mental effort to create.
Imagine making a completely accurate diagram of everything in a car's engine bay, either while the engine is running and it's doing 70mph down the highway, or after it's had a head-on collision at the same speed.
And remember that every second you're under the hood looking at it, youre afraid of getting caught and sentenced for fiddling with cadavers without permission.
I had to look up the history and while it was illegal at points in history, anatomy theaters became popular in the 16th century.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_anatomy
The period I was thinking about was some British history, 17th-19th century, the bodysnatching thing.
Maybe blood vessels that are part of the clitoris? Clitoris is not just one little knob on the vulva but a rather pronounced organ that has erections in tissue that stretches deeper into the pelvis, very alike the male erective tissues (clitoris and penis have a lot in common and evolve from the same cell cluster in embryo).
Even parts of modern medicine is struggling with the reality of the "erecting" clitoris (as they do with a lot of female medicine). In that aspect this drawing would be rather modern and sort of accurate.
Okay, okay, I can get the internal structures being an unknown.
But damn, could they not have found someone willing to show the artist their cooch? That's the one part that you don't have to cut someone open to know what it looks like. I mean, you can, but it's totally optional, and much messier.
Point is, they could have found some way to trick someone into being a model. Like, "hello ma'am, your shoes are unbuttoned", then run around behind them, flip their skirts up and take a peek at the very least.
Well dissecting corpses was considered sacrilegis because religious people, but it's possible that they made it that wrong on purpose. Moral sensibilities are arbitrary and irrational, and in a society where they completely trump all things science, sometimes you got to make some compromises to squeak past the censorship. Honestly it's not that different today, just in different places.
I'm not sure what dissection of bodies has to do with drawing external genitalia, but yeah, I suppose social mores would explain away the lack of having seen genitals, and/or drawing them badly.
Is the vulva depicted that inaccurate? I've seen a fair share of vulva in my life, and they come in a lot of different versions, from very thin and tight lips to a more loose and wide combination of skin folds. The artist may simply have seen or used a model that had a tight vulva with a rather pronounced pubic mound. And the vagina is a sort of "tunnel" (probably not that rigid and straight as shown here) so if you isolated vulva and vagina from the surrounding tissue this drawing may be a rather good approximation of reality, especially when seen in its historical context.
(I can't say much about the other body parts in this pic as I only approached vulva and vagina and maybe got in touch with a cervix from time to time.)
Well, I was a nurse's assistant for twenty years, and had female patients in ages ranging from infant to 103. Sometimes, someone poops and you have to get in there and visually confirm everything is clear.
I never once saw vulvae like that. Never have in pornography, erotica, or with sexual partners.
As art it's fine. Nothing wrong with interpretation of reality. But as an anatomical model, it fails horribly.
For one thing, no clitoral hood. No urethra that I can see. Even assuming the near infinite variety of shapes labia can be, and assuming that a person only has labia as depicted, there's still a lack of other anatomy that would be easy to visually verify for something intended as an anatomical reference.
Tbh, it looks less realistic than some of the stuff I saw on bathroom walls in high school lol.
Even pictures I've seen of genital mutilation, voluntary body modification, and post surgical results don't look like that.
I think the closest I've seen was post labiaplasty, when everything was still swollen enough the lady couldn't close her legs without pain.
I just don't believe the artist used any model at all.
I see two ureters running from the kidneys to the bladder, one ureter cut, bladder pushed to right side. Urethra runs from bladder on top of vagina. Some dissection knowledge present.
Vulva and pubic mound are present, if not terribly well drawn. There may be some influence of vulva as a mouth.
Ovaries are present as is uterus. Muscular nature of uterus is shown along with fetus.
Clitoris seems to be missing.
There are extra pipes all over, with some going to the wrong locations, and things seem to be linked to the liver. The liver being involved is likely due to whatever medical theories were prevalent at the time, humors maybe.
I would assume that the artist likely took a lot of inspiration from animal entrails.
Ignorance isn't the same as stupid. Looks like a lot of thought was put into it. I would view this more as an early map than as an attempt at realism.
i'm honestly kinda impressed that it's this accurate, i certainly wouldn't produce something this accurate after looking at a woman's abdomen cut open, i'd be busy vomiting.