It's a little pea-sized thing that can give women immense pleasure. Except, as Dame Lesley Regan, MD, a Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Imperial College London and the UK’s Women’s Health Ambassador, demonstrated at the recent HLTH Europe 2026 conference by gleefully fishing an anatomical model out of her bag, it isn’t actually pea-sized at all.
Medscape Medical News reports that plucking a tiny pink speck off a model vulva, she explained that what we traditionally think of as the clitoris is merely the tip of an iceberg.
“Most of it is under the surface, and you can’t see it,” Regan said, revealing the sweeping internal body, crura (legs), and bulbs of an erect, engorged clitoris. “It’s a lot bigger than you think.”
Profound ignorance of the clitoris and its functioning has, for decades, left us blind to the root causes of issues such as postpartum nerve damage and the agonising long-term side effects of pelvic surgeries.
“The fact that it’s 2026 and we are just discovering the clitoris is full of nerves, it’s kind of embarrassing,” Mare Lensvelt, MD, editor-in-chief at Dutch Health Hub, The Netherlands, said. “I’m surprised so many people are surprised that the clitoris has so many nerves. Ask any woman.”
“If this had been a male organ, we probably would not have had only a map; we would have had atlases, and Google Maps would have done something,” joked Paula Bellostas Muguerza, global lead of healthcare and life sciences at Kearney, who chaired the session.
Instead, medicine is dealing with a fundamental gap in women’s health research, driven by three glaring discrepancies: only 20% of research funding goes toward women’s health, a mere 3% of clinical trials are women-specific, and only 31% of the translational pipeline addresses the massive unmet needs of female patients beyond breast and ovarian cancers, she said.
The clitoris is the perfect, neglected poster child for this systemic bias. Long obscured by societal prudishness and outdated science, its true anatomy is only now being dragged into the light. Why has it taken until now for medicine to properly notice?
“Historically, women were not meant to enjoy sex because it’s an organ of pleasure, and it’s very effective,” Regan said.
Mapping nerve branches
Neuroscientist Ju Young Lee, PhD, a research associate at Amsterdam UMC, the leading academic medical centre in The Netherlands, succeeded in mapping the clitoris using synchrotron x-ray imaging at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France.
The facility’s instrument – which Lee described as resembling a giant donut or spaceship – generates X-rays 10 trillion times stronger than those of a conventional CT machine. “That’s what makes the image quality exceptional.”
The lack of anatomical mapping has had devastating clinical consequences. Lee, whose research shifted from studying the brain in isolation to looking at how the nervous system communicates with pelvic organs, was drawn to the project by the horrifying realisation that there was no comprehensive nerve map to perform an episiotomy, one of the most common procedures performed on women worldwide.
“Women suffer from long-term side effects due to nerve damage,” Lee said.
Since publishing her research, her inbox has been flooded with messages from patients who had lost sensation after childbirth, even losing the ability to reach orgasm. “It seems that there is an unmet need and a huge potential for improving postpartum care,” she said.
The data are equally vital for reconstructive surgeries, such as treating women who have undergone female genital mutilation or those undergoing labiaplasty.
“The surgery to reconstruct the vulva often damages what's left of the clitoris,” Regan said. “If you have that sort of surgery, there’s a high likelihood that you disrupt the neural networks because this is a massive network of branching, like a branching tree, all the way down the vulva.”
A call to action for innovators
For Lee, the success of the clitoris-mapping project serves as a blueprint for how the broader medical and investment community can tackle underfunded areas of women’s health without starting from scratch.
The synchrotron imaging infrastructure used for her work was originally scaled up during the Covid pandemic to image human lungs as part of the Human Organ Atlas Project.
Once built, the technology was easily repurposed for pelvic anatomy.
“The lesson here is you may already have the tools to contribute to women’s health,” Lee said. “You don’t need to build a whole new pipeline. I personally see a lot of low-hanging fruit and a lot of potential.”
Rewriting the script in clinical research means recognising that women’s health is not a niche specialty; it is health for 51% of the global population. As Regan bluntly reminded the audience – more than 400 delegates from around 65 countries – ignoring this demographic means walking away from a “huge opportunity” for commercial, scientific, and therapeutic advancements.
Broadening the medical lens benefits everyone, said Bellostas Muguerza. “If the life sciences sector commits to genuinely studying that 51% of the population, we will finally unlock a clearer, more accurate understanding of health for 100% of it.”
Medscape article – Mapping the Clitoris Reshapes Our Understanding of Women’s Health (Open access)
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Gynaes ‘play it safe’ as medico-legal claims rise
UK call for blanket ban on designer vaginas