No, this isn’t what you think it is, readers: I know it *looks* like a penis, but really it’s not. Rather, what you see is a 16th-century woodcut illustration of the dissected genitals of a woman.
Er, if that’s not obvious to you, don’t worry. Commissioned for Andreus Vesalius’s famous _De humani corporis fabrica_ (1543), this alleged vagina and uterus looks phallic because the artist could only see the female genitals through the biased lense of everything he had heard about them in the science of his day. And that science had come from the Ancient Greeks, and it hadn’t shaken off the idea (by this time about 2,000 years old) that women were mis-shapen men, and their bodies’ genitals had formed by imperfect imitation of their male counterparts.
As the Ancient Roman-era physician Galen had written back in the first century CE, women were naturally colder than men, and this produced a defect because they were unable to “produce enough heat to ‘cook’ their genitalia properly,” as art historian Carol Richardson summarized. And that coldness explains why — according to these 16th-century anatomists — the lady bits just never descended out of the body like a good and proper man’s does. This drawing of a “phallic uterus” shows the vagina and uterus as inverted male gonads; it wasn’t a drawing made from an observed dissection. (The urethra even opens into the vagina in this drawing. Eww.)
Source(s): Image attributed to the workshop of Titan, ‘The Phallic Uterus,’ in _Andrea Vesalii Bruxellensis, scholae medicorum Patavinae professoris, de Humani corporis fabrica Libri septem, Basel: Ed officina loannis Oporini, c 1543, book 5, page 381. Photo: University of Edinburgh. “Bernini’s arwvenge? Art, gynaecology and theology at St Peter’s, Rome. Carol M. Richardson _Art History_ Feb 1, 2020.
