Human Body Part That Stumped Leonardo da Vinci Revealed

Leonardo da Vinci's 500-year-old illustrations of human anatomy are uncannily accurate with just one major exception: the female reproductive system.

That's probably because Leonardo had a tough time finding female corpses to dissect, explains Peter Abrahams, a practicing physician at the University of Warwick Medical School in the United Kingdom.

Abrahams, a clinical anatomist, has lent his knowledge to an audio tour of the exhibit of Leonardo's anatomical drawings that opened May 4 in Buckingham Palace.

The Italian Renaissance artist learned anatomy as a way to improve his drawings of the human form, but he also brought a scientist's eye to the discipline.

"He wanted to understand how it worked," Abrahams told LiveScience. "He looked at humans like a mechanic would do. Most of that work is very, very relevant today."

Anatomists in Leonardo's time often dissected unclaimed bodies, such as of drunks and vagrants, and those bodies were more likely to be male, Abrahams said.

"It was definitely harder to get female bodies to dissect, and he didn't have many opportunities," Abrahams said.

Advances in anatomy

By Leonardo's time, few advances in human anatomy had been made since the second-century work by the Roman anatomist Galen, whose discoveries were largely based on animal dissections. Leonardo da Vinci had the advantage of access to human cadavers.

Abrahams says studying them would have been obnoxious work. "It must have been horrible, because they didn't have any form of embalming," he said. "Within two or three days that body decomposes."

Leonardo's sketches reveal a deep understanding of how the body worked, much of it still up-to-date. Modern anatomists have only begun in the last 60 years to look at the muscles and tendons of the finger in the detail that da Vinci did, Abrahams said. Leonardo was the first to draw the human spine with the correct curves. He also came tantalizingly close to understanding how blood moved through the body, a mystery that wouldn't be fully solved until 1628, more than a century after his death.

"In many ways, he was literally 100 years ahead of his time," Abrahams said.

The artist was also the first to draw a fetus in utero. Even so, many of his drawings of the female reproductive system get details wrong, Abrahams said. His drawings of the cervix and other female reproductive organs resembled those of animals more than humans, Abrahams said.

"Some of the drawings of the female pelvis he's tried to extrapolate from animals and not always got it right."

Read more at Discovery News