Bone vessels and cartilage. In the human body at birth, there are over 270 bones, but many of these fuse together during development, leaving a total of 206 separate bones in the adult, not counting numerous small sesamoid bones. The largest bone in the body is the femur or thigh-bone, and the smallest is the stapes in the middle ear. The Greek word for bone is ὀστέον ("osteon"), hence the many terms that use it as a prefix – such as osteopathy. Bone is not uniformly solid, but consists of a flexible matrix (about 30%) and bound minerals (about 70%) which
Body snatching wanted to identify every bone in the human body and reconstruct it like a jigsaw puzzle. At the time, there was only one set of text books about the body at Vesalius's disposal, written by Claudius Galen 1300 years earlier. Vesalius made over 200 corrections to Galen's book based on what he had learned from dissecting stolen bodies, and ignited a new age of modern medicine. For over 200 years, the city of Kolkata, in the north-eastern region of India, has been known to be the center of a network of bone traders who remove skeletons from graveyards in order