Anatomy – A Brilliant Failure

(The cost of taking things apart)

Anatomy has given us extraordinary precision. We can name every bump and groove, trace each vessel and nerve, and describe the path of a single artery through a millimetre of tissue with the accuracy of a cartographer. Unfortunately, the anatomical map was left unfinished.

The unfinished puzzle
When we teach anatomy, we take the body apart, study and label each piece — and then stop. The foot becomes a region, the head another, and the human being evaporates somewhere between them. The foot and the head coexist, of course; no anatomist would deny that. But the functional relationship between them rarely materialises.

A twisted ankle changes the shape and function of the whole person as compensations take hold. The head may shift to help a limp; the spine adapts to the altered load; the opposite hip and lower limb change their movement pattern.

“Medicine worships the measurable and neglects the meaningful.”

This isn’t esoteric philosophy — it’s physics. Tip one leg of a table and the whole structure adjusts its load. The same laws apply to the body. Yet the way anatomy is taught, you’d think gravity were optional.

Go to a doctor with back pain six months after an ankle injury and the connection between the two will likely be treated as coincidence, not consequence.

The cultural grammar of classical anatomy
The problem isn’t a lack of science but the grammar of the discipline. Classical anatomy speaks in nouns — muscles, ligaments, nerves — while living tissue speaks in verbs: glide, transmit, adapt, balance. The anatomist speaks in “things” where the living body demands attention to relationships.

With such contrasting vocabularies, it’s no wonder that ideas about function sound heretical in traditional circles. Saying “the head compensates for the foot” isn’t anatomically incorrect; it merely crosses disciplines without permission. It violates the accepted cultural grammar of anatomy.

The body doesn’t behave as a set of isolated structures but as a continuous field of relationships, every movement a conversation between distant regions. Yet in most anatomy teaching, these relationships vanish. We are trained to describe structure, not relationship; location, not behaviour. The dissection room, by its nature, freezes life in order to study form — and then mistakes that stillness for truth.

“The more precisely we label the pieces, the less we seem to understand the person.”

Traditional anatomy arose from Enlightenment reductionism, the principle of taking things apart to understand them. A marvellous strategy for surgery, where clear boundaries save lives. But as a way of describing how living bodies behave, it’s like trying to understand jazz by studying a trumpet.

The body obeys physics, not curriculum
The relational view is often dismissed as abstract, yet the evidence for it is everywhere. Kinetic-chain research shows how force and motion ripple across joints (Kibler & Livingston 2001). Studies on fascial continuity demonstrate measurable tension transfer between distant muscles (Huijing 2009; Wilke et al. 2016). Neuroscience confirms that postural control involves constant dialogue between foot, pelvis, trunk, and head (Panjabi 1992).

None of this is controversial outside the anatomical silo. In biomechanics, motor control, and fascia research, interdependence is assumed. But anatomy, trained by centuries of compartmental thinking, still teaches future doctors as if the body were a set of interchangeable spare parts rather than a continuous negotiation with gravity.

Anatomy without relationship is like cooking without heat
When I first left school, I apprenticed in classical French cookery in a London brasserie. Cooking teaches something that dissection can’t: touch changes things. When you cook fish, a steak, or a sabayon, you feel transformation — tightening, softening, denaturing. Change happens constantly; your job is to train your hands to feel it.

Working with people in pain feels much the same. We feel warmth spread, muscle tone shift, circulation change. All of this can be explained physiologically — neural input, vascular response, tissue compliance — but whatever the mechanism, touch alters the living system.

The key word here is living. In the clinic, everything changes. In the dissection room, nothing does. Touch a living body and it responds; touch a dead one and it stays still. The irony is that Western medicine learned from the dead and somehow forgot the living.

“Anatomy taught us how to name a nerve but not how to feel one.”

We learned to touch the dead and stopped touching the living
This is the unspoken legacy of Victorian anatomy. The rise of dissection in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries taught generations of doctors to touch without feeling. They were trained on corpses, rewarded for detachment, and warned against emotional or physical intimacy with patients. By the time modern medicine arrived, touch had become morally suspect and professionally dangerous (Reiser 1978; Montagu 1971).

We built a healthcare system where doctors are expected to see rather than feel. A stethoscope or scanner became a safe proxy for contact. The clinician’s hands — once the primary diagnostic instrument — were replaced by sensors, screens, and data.

“For medicine, detachment became a virtue and touch became a risk.”

And yet every mammal knows what touch means. We hug to reassure, hold to soothe, rub to comfort. It’s not “alternative medicine”; it’s mammalian physiology. Oxytocin release, parasympathetic activation, mechanotransduction — all measurable, not magical (Montagu 1971; Ingber 1997).

Putting the body back together
Anatomy was never wrong; it was simply unfinished. It gave us the map but forgot the landscape. It described the parts but not the patterns, and created knowledge without connection.

Functional anatomy — the kind I teach in my Transformational Anatomy Programme (TAP) — is about finishing that story: seeing the body as a living system of relationships — fascia, muscle, nerve, and movement woven together under the same gravitational laws that govern everything else in the universe.

When we start seeing anatomy this way, the apparent mysteries of movement, pain, and adaptation become not mystical but profoundly human, utterly logical, and endlessly fascinating.

If that idea resonates, come and explore it in my free three-part fascia training: Fascia Myths and Function. It’s where we start to put the body and the meaning, back together.

Suggested Reading

Vesalius A (1543) De humani corporis fabrica. Basel: Johannes Oporinus.
Gray H (1858) Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical. London: John W. Parker and Son.
Panjabi M M (1992) ‘The stabilizing system of the spine’, Journal of Spinal Disorders, 5 (4), pp. 383–389.
Huijing P A (2009) ‘Muscle as a collagen fibre reinforced composite’, Journal of Biomechanics, 42 (1), pp. 1–10.
Wilke J et al. (2016) ‘What is evidence-based about myofascial chains?’, Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 97 (3), pp. 454–461.
Montagu A (1971) Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin. New York: Harper & Row.
Reiser S J (1978) Medicine and the Reign of Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ingber D E (1997) ‘Tensegrity: the architectural basis of cellular mechanotransduction’, Annual Review of Physiology,59, pp. 575–599.

References (Harvard, Cite Them Right 10th ed.)
Bell, C. (1811) The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design. London: Pickering.
Benjamin, M. (2009) ‘The fascia of the limbs and back – a review’, Journal of Anatomy, 214 (1), pp. 1–18. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-7580.2008.01011.x.
Galen (c. 170 CE) On the Natural Faculties. Translated by A.J. Brock (1916). London: William Heinemann.
Gray, H. (1858) Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical. London: John W. Parker and Son.
Huijing, P.A. (2009) ‘Muscle as a collagen fibre reinforced composite: a review of force transmission in muscle and whole limb’, Journal of Biomechanics, 42 (1), pp. 1–10. doi: 10.1016/j.jbiomech.2008.09.027.
Ingber, D.E. (1997) ‘Tensegrity: the architectural basis of cellular mechanotransduction’, Annual Review of Physiology,59, pp. 575–599. doi: 10.1146/annurev.physiol.59.1.575.
Inman, V.T., Ralston, H.J. and Todd, F. (1981) Human Walking. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins.
Kibler, W.B. and Livingston, B. (2001) ‘Anatomy and biomechanics of the shoulder in the kinetic chain’, Sports Medicine, 31 (6), pp. 409–425. doi: 10.2165/00007256-200131060-00005.
Montagu, A. (1971) Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin. New York: Harper & Row.
Panjabi, M.M. (1992) ‘The stabilizing system of the spine. Part I: Function, dysfunction, adaptation, and enhancement’, Journal of Spinal Disorders, 5 (4), pp. 383–389.
Reiser, S.J. (1978) Medicine and the Reign of Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sahrmann, S.A. (2002) Diagnosis and Treatment of Movement Impairment Syndromes. St Louis: Mosby.
Vesalius, A. (1543) De humani corporis fabrica libri septem. Basel: Johannes Oporinus. (English translation by W.F. Richardson and J.B. Carman, 1950, Cleveland: World Publishing Company.)
Wilke, J., Krause, F., Vogt, L. and Banzer, W. (2016) ‘What is evidence-based about myofascial chains? A systematic review’, Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 97 (3), pp. 454–461. doi: 10.1016/j.apmr.2015.07.023.