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 found in hermaphrodites. This inglorious misunderstanding set the stage for the next four hundred and fifty years, which saw the clitoris routinely lost, rediscovered and subsequently dismissed by the medical patriarchy.
