I remember those fifth-grade anatomy lessons where we boys first got a glance at the Fairer Sex’s innards. There was a hazy outline of a generic female form, with color diagrams of the uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries. I’m wondering if they were drawn to scale, or if their size was exaggerated for illustrative purposes.
IOW: how big are these organs, relative to the size of their owner? IOW, if I cut open a 21-year-old, 130-pound woman and started looking for her ovaries, how big would they be? How about the fallopian tubes & uterus?
Lest anyone think I should as a woman about this, Mrs. HeyHomie didn’t know either.
Sex Ed classes always taught us that a woman’s uterus is about the size of her fist. A recent episode of Oprah in which a surgeon showed off various human organs made me think that a uterus is, in fact, much smaller–or the guy had really big hands. Or the organs had shrunk during preservation. The ovaries were about the size of snow pea pods. The fallopian tubes looked on par with worsted-weight yarn.
You have to remember that most of these parts, when illustrations are shown bigger than life, are scaled to be proportional to the ovum, which is about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.
Which means that the fallopian tubes WILL be about the diameter of mid-size knitting yarn, and the ovaries will be about the size of your thumb. I’d always heard that the uterus is about the size of a pear.
According to Gray’s Anatomy, the uterus is 7.5 cm long, 5 cm wide, and about 2.5 cm thick. That’s roughly 3 inches long, 2 inches wide, and about an inch thick. The dimensions do change when the woman has a full bladder or a full rectum. Note that this is in the unpregnant state. When the woman is pregnant, the uterus thins out as it stretches.
The ovaries are each about the size of an almond. There is no mention of the dimensions of the fallopian tubes, but the yarn comparison is about right, IIRC.
None of the female reproductive organs are very big.