Bellybutton scar

Your belly button is your very first scar. It’s scar tissue left over from where the
umbilical cord joined you to your mother’s placenta when you were in her womb. Just
like fingerprints, no two belly buttons are alike. All the nourishments going to the baby
and all the wastes coming out passed through the belly button via the umbilical cord.
Once you had been delivered, your umbilical cord was usually clamped or tied, and then
cut. The stump withered and fell off after a few days, leaving behind the scar we call the
belly button.
Your abdominal wall is made up of various layers, including skin, muscle, and fat.
They are all fused together at your belly button. You have subcutaneous (literally, “under
your skin”) fat that plumps up the skin all over your body.
But the fat cannot lift the skin at the belly button, because the skin at that location is
fused to your abdominal wall.
That’s why the belly button is concave. The umbilical cord is made up of four different
structures : there are two arteries (taking waste to the placenta), one vein (supplying
oxygenated blood and food), the allantois (which degenerates and turns into the bladder)
and the vitello-intestinal duct (which turns into the intestines)

Bellybutton shapes

In medicine and surgery, a “symptom” is something that the patient complains of, eg, “I
urinate a lot and I’m always thirsty.” A “sign” is something that the doctor would notice,
such as yellowish tissue near the eye,
Hamilton Bailey wrote a famous textbook devoted to signs, demonstrations of Physical
Signs in Clinical Surgery. He included many of the signs of the human body that could
describe and/or photograph. He became strangely poetic when he wrote that “every time
an abdomen is examined, the eyes of the clinician, almost instinctively, rest momentary
upon the umbilicus. How innumerable are the variations of this structure!”
Gerhard Reibmann, a Berlin psychologist, sees the belly button differently from
Hamilton Bailey. He believes that you can diagnose a person’s life expectancy, general
health and psychological state purely by looking at their belly button. He paid for the
publication of his own book, which he called Centred: Understanding Yourself Through
Your Navel.
In it, he reckons that there are six different types of navel. He claims that each one has
a specific personality type and a specific life expectancy associated with it. It’s easy to be
skeptical of something this “easy”, although it may turn out to be as inaccurate as
phrenology (diagnosing character type by feeling the lumps and bumps on a person’s
skull).

Horizontal Navel

Gerhard Reibmann, a Berlin psychologist, claims that if you have a horizontal navel
(spreading sideways across your tummy), you’re likely to be highly emotional, live for
only 68 years. But if you have a vertical navel that runs up and down your belly, you’ll
magically be generous, self-confident and emotionally stable. Somehow, this means that
your life expectancy will be around 75 years.
A person with an outie, or protruding belly button, is claimed to be optimistic and
enthusiastic and will live for 72 years. However a person who has a concave, bowl-
shaped navel will be gentle, loving, cautious, delicate, sensitive, and rather prone to
worrying. Presumably, this worry will take a toll on their health, so they’ll have the
shortest life expectancy of all – only 65 years.
The final (and luckiest) type of navel is the evenly shaped and circular navel. This
person is modest and even tempered and has a quiet, retiring personality – as a result will
live for 81 years.
Now, as we all know, anything to do with the human body always turns out to be more
complicated that you first thought. How long will you live if your navel fits more that one
of the six categories? Easy, according to Gerhard Reibmann – just add the number of
years together and divide by the total number of categories to work out your personal life
expectancy.
The average life expectancy in Australia is 83.2 years for women and 77.2 years for
men. I guess that a lot of Australian women must have navels that are rounder than round.

Cancer and the belly button

Very rarely, a secondary cancer can be found in the belly button especially of women.
It’s called a Sister Joseph’s Nodule, or Sister Mary Joseph Nodule, in honour of Sister
Joseph of the Mayo Clinic.
Sister Joseph had an observant clinical eye for women patients and their lumps. She had
honed it very finely indeed, over a period of very many years. In particular, on a few
occasions, Sister Joseph had a notice that a certain type of lump in the belly button of
women would later be associated with a cancer – colon, cervix, or breast. This cancer
would usually be in its last stage
She told Dr. William Mayo, who agreed with her. Her “sign” now has a permanent
place in surgical history