Posterior ( Aristotle ) : Caudal (Cleland, 1879) in relation to the longitudinal axis (Barclay, 1803); commonly used in this way for comparative anatomy, as was the case for Aristotle in De Partibis Animalium; see, for example, translation of Ogle (1912, 684b-25). Vicq d'Azyr (1786, pp. 51, 58) first clearly defined the term as behind or opposite the face, corresponding in most vertebrates to caudal, and in humans to dorsal (Barclay, 1803) or posterior (Galen, c177). Discarding the ambiguous terms anterior and posterior has been urged since at least 1880 (Spitzka, 1880, p. 75); also see anterior (Aristotle), Standring (2008, Fig. 1).

list of all the FMC thesaurus terms | search the thesaurus