The Gene: An Intimate History

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Galen’s students and followers stretched this analogy, quite literally, to its absurd point, reasoning that the uterus was the scrotum ballooning inward, and that the fallopian tubes were the seminal vesicles blown up and expanded. The theory was memorialized in a medieval verse, an anatomical mnemonic for medical students: Though they of different sexes be Yet on the whole, they’re the same as we For those that have the strictest searchers been Find women are just men turned outside in.

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