The clitoris is perhaps the only organ even more understudied than the vagina. It arrived on the anatomical map in the mid-sixteenth century, having been ‘discovered’, somewhat unconventionally, by an Italian Catholic priest called Gabriele Falloppio (1523–62).5 Falloppio was a keen anatomist and unlikely authority on female reproductive anatomy. When Falloppio’s finding was shared, however, with the great physician Vesalius, the founder of modern human anatomy, it was swiftly dismissed. Vesalius proclaimed that ‘this new and useless part’ didn’t exist in ‘healthy’ women, and was only to be
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