Notes

So I have a superficial layer of skin and a layer of muscle and skin that makes sense superficial and deep, so that that works in both directions. And then a personal favorite, we've got proximal and distal. My limb extends out there, so the fingers are the distal ends of my limb or as my humerus is proximal to the esophagus. The GI tract is a continuous track flowing all the way through us. The sagittal plane is if an archer has fired an arrow into the body of Sagittarius the Archer right, so a sagittal plane This is a plane in this direction, also called the anteroposterior plane, and then we have a special version, the mid sagittal plane, which is in the midline. This also gets called the medianplane, so the mid sagittal plane is right down the midline, so this would be medial or internal rotation, and this would be external or lateral rotation. When we finally start adding these movements that we call circumduction of these balls and socket joints, some parts of the body have special movements like you can protract and retract your scapula, you can put food in your mandible and recruit you, and then we have a transverse plane that is cutting asection in this direction, which is also known as the X Y plane or trans X Y plane in radiologists like that term sobump. So the coronal plane is then runningdown like this, so that's the coronal plane. Those are the three main planes For example, the median plane in the upper limb goes through the third finger. We can also describe things relative to any other plane that isn't on those nice neat XYZ axes. For example, if you cut in an anoblique angle through the body, it would be an oblique plane. And then from the anatomical position, we can also say cranial and caudal. Cranial towards the head, caudal towards the tail And then we can rotate things, like the humerus. We can rotate the humerus, but we call it inversion and e-version, but that's for another topic. So there you have it: basic terminology to help you read about and talk about anatomy.