Anatomy Of The Human Foot

No holds barred: One man's journey through pro wrestling

As a person who wears American flag pants, randomly shouts Daniel Day-Lewis lines in public and has placed bets on women's college basketball games (it was a dark point in life), you can imagine how an exercise requiring extensive self-analysis would be challenging. For my classmates, many of whom have just as much of a chance of curing cancer as they do of going to prison for insider trading, the topic was just as perplexing.

Any idea offered up by the class was quickly given the thumbs down from Conan the Barbarian. "That's not you," he huffed at us. "I just wanna know ... WHO are YOU?!"

"Screw it," I told myself. Jesus wasn't going to help me after all the dead baby jokes I had made in economics class. Plus, I still owed Him money from the Jets game. I did the responsible thing. I walked into the school library, walked past all the rows of leather-bound books containing philosophical treatises and sayings from the saints, sat down at one of the computers and fired up YouTube.

After watching Flea Market Montgomery for the 32nd time and a few bum fights, I somehow ended up on the epic "I Quit" match from "WrestleMania 13" between Bret "Hitman" Hart and "Stone Cold" Steve Austin.

In terms of WrestleManias, "WrestleMania 13" was like "Batman & Robin," only with a tad more spandex and fewer puns. Yet buried beneath that turd mine of pay-per-view shows was the diamond that was Hart vs. Austin. For about 30 minutes, the two beat the living bejesus out of each other like they were two 15-year-old girls fighting for the right to get fertilized by Justin Bieber.

As Hart locked the bloodied Texas Rattlesnake into the dreaded sharpshooter, a light bulb went off in my head. I remembered that whenever he gave his pre-match interviews, Hart would always turn to the camera and proclaim himself to be "the best there is, the best there was and the best there ever will be."

God had sent me a savior donned in pink and black trunks.

I wrote a 10-to12-page term paper heavily based not on the theological proofs of Aquinas or the deontological arguments of Kant, but on a single catch line from the Excellence of Execution.

I rode that line to an "A."

Ever since I flipped on the TV that one Saturday afternoon when I was 5 years old to see a bearded man with a voice that sounds like he choked down a bucket of pine cones wearing the outfit of a colorblind transvestite cowboy, I've been hooked to professional wrestling. I'm not one of those guys who collect the action figures and live in their parents' basement until they're 40, but I'm pretty damn close.

Human Anatomy for the Artist: The Dorsal Foot: How Do I Love Thee ...

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of spending the day with 20 of my students at Body Worlds exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry here in Chicago. It was a great day spent in the company of many wonderful students and friends, and it was unique opportunity to use real human specimens to discuss many of the structures we've covered in anatomy class. I have a real soft spot for the human foot-- particularly the dorsal side, where several superficial tendons can be seen just beneath the skin, sweeping gracefully across the convex arrangement of metatarsal and phalanges. So I experienced a particularly intense nerd buzz at Body Worlds when given the opportunity to explain these relationships using an actual human foot. We weren't allowed to touch the foot, but frantically stabbing my finger on the glass case in which it rested seemed to suffice. Talking about these structures while students listened (or pretended to listen) was really a lovely moment for me, so today's post is going to center on the remnants of that discussion. So... first things first. There just aren't many visible muscles in the foot. There are several on the plantar surface (the bottom--the part that touches the ground) but they are not particularly defined or visible externally. The bones of the foot, especially the metatarsals, lie in a curved arrangement, so the basic structure of the foot is concave on the plantar side, convex on the dorsal (top) side. A few layers of muscles are nestled within the concavity on the plantar side, but they are obscured superficially by the plantar aponeurosis, a thin, flat tendinous covering that helps protect the underside of the foot. We can feel the soft tissue of the muscles through this aponeurosis (which is why the bottom of the foot is not bony) but we can really see much of their definition. There are muscles on the dorsal side of the foot as well, but only a small portion of one of them shows clearly on the surface. More on that later. Most of what we can feel on the dorsal side of the foot is bone, and most of what we can see are tendons. The number of tendons we see depends on the position of the foot, but it ranges from one to seven. And there are a few other nice ones on the laterial and posterior sides of the ankle as well. How are there so many visible tendons on the foot ankle if we see so few muscles? Because the tendons we can see there come from muscles that are up higher, usually somewhere on the lower leg.

The Human foot, anatomy, deformities and treatment

Diseases of the foot

The soldier's foot and the military shoe, a handbook for officers and noncommissioned officers of the line

Elements of the anatomy of the human body in its sound state

Research and Education in Robotics, International Conference, EUROBOT 2008, Heidelberg, Germany, May 22-24, 2008. Revised Selected Papers