Why would people use a word meaning “cake” for this bloody thing?

SPONSOR: GotoMeeting Hold your meetings online for just $49/mo. Try GoToMeeting FREE for 30 days.

Every one of us has had a very intimate connection with a placenta at one point in our lives and yet, unless you work in a delivery room at a hospital, most of us would be hard pressed to identify a placenta if we saw one.

I think most of the reason for this is that our closest association with a placenta happens when we are still inside our mother; a time that few of us can remember much about.

Of course the placenta is also known as the afterbirth and is the thing that connects mothers’ and babies’ circulatory systems during that time when a baby can’t eat or breathe on account of the fact that they are trapped in a bag of fluid.

Then later, as adults, the only time we might see a placenta is shortly after the birth of a child.

For some reason during these times the child provides a significant distraction for both mother and father and so memory of what a placenta looks like just doesn’t stick with us.

Babies get their food and oxygen through their belly buttons to which is attached their umbilical chord. The other end of this trio of tubes connects to the placenta whose job it is to gently gently snuggle up against mom’s circulatory system and pass that food, oxygen and resulting waste products back and forth between the two.

Just as the inside of our lungs requires a considerable surface area to facilitate gas exchange—the usual analogy is that if you flattened out your lungs they’d add up to about one side of a tennis court—in a similar way the mom/baby exchange needs an expanded area to do its job.

We’re not talking sports venues this time but the placenta does spread out across the wall of the mother’s uterus and because of this has an appearance that is flat and round.

So back in the 16^th century when physicians chatted among themselves in classical languages they pulled out an Ancient Greek word for a flat, round cake, Latinized it and called the afterbirth placenta uterina meaning “uterine cake.”

It’s the flatness of the thing that gives it the name and some etymologists think that there is a link between the flatness represented in the word plank and the flatness of placenta.