Anatomy and Physiology Terms

A single continuous sheet folded so intricately that it both lines the abdomen and wraps the organs inside it.

The word that marks a finding as normal working rather than illness, which is often the whole question a test is asked to settle.

Its hormone announces that night has arrived rather than causing sleep, which is why light at the wrong hour shifts the whole clock.

Three names for one structure: the shift from gland to organ signals a different field talking, not a different piece of anatomy.

Called the master gland, it takes its own orders from the hypothalamus directly above, which makes the title only half deserved.

The placenta forms in the uterus during pregnancy, exchanging oxygen, nutrients, and waste between a pregnant person and the developing fetus.

Plasma and serum are not interchangeable, since serum is what remains after blood clots and has given up its clotting proteins in the process.

Count and function are separate questions, so a bleeding problem can exist in someone whose platelet number looks entirely normal.

A nerve that has become thick and misshapen due to the abnormal growth of cells and tissues that cover the nerve.

A cell that is able to develop into many different types of cells or tissues in the body.

Damage to it produces combinations of findings so characteristic that the site can often be named before any scan is done.

A vein that ends in a second network of tiny vessels instead of heading back to the heart, most famously the one feeding the liver.

Nothing is posterior on its own, since the word only carries meaning once a second structure is named for comparison.

Counted in weeks from a date that precedes conception, so the number in a scan report runs about two weeks ahead of the biology.

Its position explains its symptoms, since a gland wrapped around the urine channel cannot enlarge or inflame without the stream noticing.

Not a structure but an absence: a hole whose width two opposing muscles adjust, and one of the most watched signs in an unconscious person.

Roughly a fifth of adult sleep, returning in longer and longer bouts so that it dominates the last hours before waking.

RBC abbreviates red blood cell, the abundant blood cell that carries oxygen from the lungs to tissues throughout the body.

One word doing two jobs: it either places a finding at the end of the bowel or names how a medicine was given.

Storage rather than digestion is its job, and because it lies within reach it is one of the few bowel segments examined directly.