The Clitoris: What It Actually Is, and the History Medicine Tried to Erase

Here is a fact that should not be remarkable, and yet still is: the clitoris is the only organ in the human body whose only known function is pleasure. Every other organ multitasks. This one doesn't have to.

And yet most women reach adulthood knowing more about the reproductive anatomy printed in a Year 9 textbook than they do about this one. That's not an accident of biology. It's a five-hundred-year story of anatomists who looked right at it and chose to look away — followed, eventually, by the researchers who looked properly and rewrote the record. Knowing that history is, in its own quiet way, a form of self-respect. So let's go through it properly.

What Is the Clitoris, Really?

The clitoris is far larger than the small, visible glans at the top of the vulva , that's roughly the tip of it, not the whole of it. Beneath the skin, it extends backward and downward into the body as a wishbone-shaped structure of erectile tissue: two internal "legs" (the crura) and two vestibular bulbs that sit either side of the vaginal opening, all of which becomes engorged during arousal, much like the internal structure of the penis.

This full internal anatomy wasn't properly mapped until Australian urologist Helen O'Connell's research in 1998 and 2005 (more on her below). Before that, most medical textbooks — and most people — only ever accounted for the small external part.

Known Since Antiquity — So Why Does It Feel Like a New Discovery?

The clitoris isn't a modern finding. Ancient physicians wrote about it centuries before the Common Era:

• Around 460 BCE, Hippocrates referred to it as the columella, or "little pillar."
• Around 110 CE, the Greek physician Rufus of Ephesus specifically linked it to female pleasure.
• Around 40 CE, Galen — whose theories dominated Western medicine for over a thousand years — treated female anatomy as an inverted, "lesser" version of male anatomy, which pushed the clitoris to the margins of medical attention rather than the centre of it.

So the organ was named and noted early. What it didn't get, for most of the next fifteen centuries, was serious anatomical attention on its own terms.

The Renaissance "Discovery" That Wasn't

By the 1500s, European anatomists were dissecting human bodies in earnest — and their reactions to the clitoris are, frankly, a study in how culture shapes science.

In 1543, Andreas Vesalius — the most influential anatomist of the era — dismissed it in his landmark De Humani Corporis Fabrica as a "rare anomaly," barely worth describing. Two years later, French anatomist Charles Estienne described it as a "shameful member."

Then in 1559, the Italian anatomist Realdo Colombo (sometimes Latinised as Renaldus Columbus) published De Re Anatomica, describing the clitoris from both dissection and, notably, examination of living women — and claimed to have discovered it, calling it "the seat of female delight." His fellow anatomist Gabriele Falloppio (yes, the one the fallopian tubes are named after) disputed that claim, arguing he'd identified it first. Historians still don't fully agree who deserves credit — which rather proves the point: an organ that had already been named by Hippocrates nearly 2,000 years earlier was being fought over as a "new discovery" by two Italian men in the same decade.

Erased, Then Redrawn: The Clitoris in Modern Medicine

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn't build steadily on that Renaissance groundwork — in places, they went backward. In 1672, Dutch physician Regnier de Graaf published detailed illustrations of the clitoris and expressed genuine surprise that other anatomists had left it out of their work. In 1844, German anatomist Georg Ludwig Kobelt went further still, using injected vasculature to produce the most accurate and complete illustrations of the clitoris's internal structure that had existed up to that point — work still referenced by researchers today.

And then, by some historical accounts, the organ disappeared from view all over again: the clitoris reportedly dropped out of Gray's Anatomy — the standard medical reference text — in 1948, and when it resurfaced in a later edition it was, by some accounts, inaccurately depicted. It would not appear fully and correctly labelled in Gray's Anatomy again until the 40th edition, in 2008.

This is also the period in Victorian medicine when clitoridectomy — surgical removal of the clitoris — was performed on women in parts of Europe and the United States as a purported "treatment" for masturbation or so-called female "hysteria." It's a genuinely dark chapter, and worth naming plainly: the erasure of the clitoris from medical textbooks did not happen in a vacuum, alongside a culture that also treated female pleasure itself as a pathology to be cured.

How One Researcher Rewrote the Textbook

The modern turning point has a name: Helen O'Connell, an Australian urologist who began questioning the gaps in her own anatomical training in the 1990s — she noted that the textbooks she studied covered penile erectile anatomy in detail while barely mentioning its closest female equivalent.

• In 1998, O'Connell published research in the Journal of Urology mapping the clitoris's "widely ramified" internal structure for the first time using modern methods.
• In 2005, she followed up with a comprehensive study combining MRI imaging of living subjects with dissection, confirming that the internal bulbs and the urethra and vagina form one interconnected structure with the clitoris — the actual site of female sexual response.
• Around 2009, further research produced the first 3D ultrasound imaging of the clitoris during arousal.

Her work is, in large part, why the anatomy described earlier in this article — the internal bulbs, the crura, the full wishbone shape — is now standard, textbook fact rather than a contested claim.

What We Know Today

Put together, modern anatomy tells us the clitoris is mostly internal — commonly cited estimates put the full structure at somewhere around 9–11cm, though only a small portion (the glans) is externally visible. It's also densely innervated: older estimates — often traced back to research conducted on cow anatomy in the 1970s — put the nerve count at around 8,000. More recent human-tissue research has suggested the true number may be considerably higher, though researchers haven't settled on one definitive figure, and it's an area of ongoing study rather than closed science.

What isn't in dispute is the basic point this whole history circles back to: this is a real, thoroughly documented, purpose-built part of female anatomy. It was never a mystery. It was, for long stretches of medical history, a choice.

Why This History Matters

None of this is trivia for its own sake. Every woman who was never taught this in school, or who grew up absorbing the idea that this part of her body was somehow lesser, embarrassing, or beside the point, inherited the tail end of that five-hundred-year habit of looking away. Knowing the real anatomy — and knowing that its erasure was a choice made by particular people at particular moments, not a scientific inevitability — is one small, private way of taking that back.

That's the same belief ESCP is built on: that understanding your own body, plainly and without apology, is not indulgent. It's foundational.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who discovered the clitoris?

No single person did — it was named and documented as early as 460 BCE by Hippocrates. The Renaissance anatomist Realdo Colombo claimed to have "discovered" it in 1559, but historians dispute this, since it had already been described by ancient physicians and was independently claimed by his contemporary Gabriele Falloppio in the same era.

How much of the clitoris is internal?

Most of it. The visible glans is only a small part of a larger, wishbone-shaped structure of erectile tissue that extends internally, including two "legs" (crura) and two vestibular bulbs. This full structure wasn't accurately mapped until research by Australian urologist Helen O'Connell in 1998 and 2005.

Why was the clitoris removed from anatomy textbooks?

By some historical accounts, it disappeared from Gray's Anatomy, the standard medical reference text, in 1948, and did not reappear fully and correctly labelled until the 40th edition in 2008. Historians generally attribute this gap to broader cultural discomfort with female sexuality in medicine, rather than any scientific dispute about the organ's existence.

How many nerve endings does the clitoris have?

This is genuinely debated. A commonly cited figure of around 8,000 traces back to older research conducted on cow anatomy. More recent studies on human tissue suggest the number may be significantly higher, but researchers have not settled on one agreed figure.

Is the clitoris the only organ whose sole function is pleasure?

As far as current medical understanding goes, yes — it's widely described this way because, unlike other reproductive or erogenous anatomy, it has no established role in reproduction or any other bodily function.