Throughout the years we have learned a lot about how our bodies function and why they do the things they do, scientists have been VERY wrong in the past and some medical procedures have been very unsuccessful, and looking back we are all collectively like wow we were so dumb. But how do we know for sure we are correct now? Like how did we learn that the ovaries producs eggs that become fertilized by sperms and how on earth was this discovered and tested? How do we know its our thyroid that regulates hormones that effect other parts of the body?
In: Biology
Human bodies have been around for along time, and they have been cut open an examined. Some of those experiments were less ethical than we’d like, but the collection of medical knowledge grows over time. We are in no sense “sure we are correct now”. Thousands of medical researchers work every day on problems we do not yet understand. We’ve got centuries of work to go in medicine.
Sperm and eggs are pretty easy to figure out because it works the same way in humans as other mammals that are easier to experiment on. From the outside it’s clear from observing animal sex how the penis and vagina fit together. Sperm are plentiful, easy to collect, and pretty easy to see once you invent the microscope. Eggs are quite a bit trickier, but examining a dead female body will allow the connections between the organs to be figured out directly. The kinds of microscopic techniques used to harvest live human eggs without harming the woman took centuries to develop.
The role of the thyroid is pretty clear if it is removed, or a piece cut out and chemically analyzed. It’s a detective story, piecing many facts to get a coherent theory, but there are lots of people with random variation which can inform some studies.
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