Reality Really Sucks.

Imagine the naked abdomen of a beautiful woman - perhaps your favourite Hollywood actress, or the girlfriend of that lucky bastard in Accounts. 

Or, if you're a lilly-livered nancy-boy scared shitless by the prospect of having your small but perfectly-formed arse sued off for the unauthorised publishing a photo of, say, Sharon Stone (who was my original choice to illustrate the concept of a breathtakingly beautiful woman), the Mona Lisa.


The female abdomen is part of a field of dreams for the overwhelming majority of half the human race.
But for medical practitioners in a clinical setting, that alluring abdominal wall is merely (as Alan Sherman pointed out) the integument that keeps your insides in, an opaque container obscuring the reason for many presenting symptoms.

It's the roof of a factory busily converting food and fluids into energy and processing the waste products of this process. 

For medical students (when sober) it looks like a page in my copy of Frank H. Netter's Atlas of Human Anatomy*

But, as Paul Simon might elegantly put it, girls abdomens could never match our sweet imagination. 

Everything looks worse in black and white.



                                          ***************


*Dr Netter's wonderful atlas was my constant companion during my undergraduate and postgraduate days at university and teaching hospitals. 
His atlas is published by Novartis, East Hanover, New Jersey. 

(If you are a medical student and you have't got a copy of this wonderful book, get your finger out and get one!


And don't forget to tell them Ben sent you. 
You won't get a discount, but you might keep me out of jail if I've inadvertently breached some arcane copyright law. Ta.)