Part of the With What family
Exercise With What

Region

Spine

The columns that hold you upright, and the joints that decide which way each part of your back can move.

5 structures · 3 muscles · 2 joints

The deep back muscles either side of the spine — erector spinae and, beneath it, multifidus.

Deep muscles of the back.

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

Henry Vandyke Carter, plate 389 of Anatomy of the Human Body (Henry Gray, 1918). Public domain — file on Wikimedia Commons.

Bone structure

  • Cervical, thoracic and lumbar vertebrae
  • Sacrum
  • Coccyx

Key functions

  • Spine extension
  • Trunk sidebending
  • Spinal stabilisation
  • Spine flexion
  • Spine sidebending
  • Spine rotation
  • Movement guidance

Muscle structure

Joints

Tendons and attachments

Erector spinae muscles
from A broad common tendon from the sacrum, iliac crest and lumbar spinous processes
to Ribs, transverse and spinous processes of vertebrae, and the skull, in overlapping columns
Multifidus
from Sacrum, iliac crest, and the transverse processes of vertebrae
to Spinous processes of vertebrae two to four levels above
Rotatores muscles
from Transverse processes of vertebrae
to Lamina and spinous process of the vertebra one or two levels above

Movements that load it

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.