Part of the With What family
Exercise With What

Region

Neck

The muscles that hold your head up and turn it, and the vertebrae they move it on.

5 structures · 5 muscles

The sternocleidomastoid crossing the front of the neck, with the scalenes and the strap muscles beneath it.

Muscles of the neck. Anterior view.

That is the plate’s own caption, as printed in the 1918 edition.

Henry Vandyke Carter, plate 386 of Anatomy of the Human Body (Henry Gray, 1918). Public domain — file on Wikimedia Commons.

Bone structure

  • Cervical vertebrae
  • Hyoid

Key functions

  • Neck sidebending
  • Rib elevation
  • Neck extension
  • Neck rotation
  • Neck flexion

Muscle structure

Tendons and attachments

Scalenus anterior
from Anterior tubercles of the transverse processes of the third to sixth cervical vertebrae
to Scalene tubercle of the first rib
Scalenus medius
from Posterior tubercles of the transverse processes of the cervical vertebrae
to Upper surface of the first rib, behind the groove for the subclavian artery
Splenius capitis
from Lower half of the nuchal ligament and the spinous processes of the seventh cervical and upper thoracic vertebrae
to Mastoid process and the lateral third of the superior nuchal line
Splenius cervicis
from Spinous processes of the third to sixth thoracic vertebrae
to Posterior tubercles of the transverse processes of the upper two or three cervical vertebrae
Sternocleidomastoid
from Manubrium of the sternum (sternal head) and the medial third of the clavicle (clavicular head)
to Mastoid process of the temporal bone and the superior nuchal line

Movements that load it

No movement in the Repertoire loads this region yet.

Where this came from

Every name, attachment and action on this page is read from The Atlas’s own records — each one checked against Terminologia Anatomica, and each one linked above so you can read the full entry. Nothing here is retyped or approximated, so this page cannot drift from the collection: it is the collection, arranged by region.

The figure is different in kind: it is sourced, not drawn here and not generated. A diagram is a claim, and an invented one is a claim nobody can check — so the plates are Henry Vandyke Carter’s, engraved for the 1918 edition and long out of copyright, credited above with a link to the file so you can verify the licence yourself. Being 1918, they carry the anatomical names of their day, which do not always match the modern ones used in the records.

Plate captions were read from the Internet Archive’s scan of the 1918 edition (anatomyofhumanbo00grayrich), and the licence of every plate was checked against its own file record on Commons rather than assumed from the age of the book. The build refuses to publish a page whose plate is not public domain.