Word: umbilicus
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...inflammation is probably better than none at all. The latter is the peculiar plight of Brooke Blanton, a 13-year-old Dallas girl who has taught researchers much of what they know about cell adhesion and wound healing. Brooke first came to doctors' attention as an infant, when her umbilicus and teething sores failed to close and became infected. Strangely, Brooke's lesions contained no pus -- the carcasses of millions of white cells that pile up at infection sites -- even though her bloodstream was teeming with infection-fighting white cells, or leukocytes...
Japan has long had a special regard for the navel. The shape of the umbilicus of a newborn baby would be discussed at length, and if it happened to point downward, the parents would brace themselves for a weakling child who would bring them woe. The thunder god Raijin, with his terrifying drums, his great horns and long tusks, was said to have an insatiable appetite for young navels, and mothers had constantly to nag their youngsters to keep themselves well covered up. But for all the national preoccupation with it, the navel in Japan never quite achieved the status...
...when it was the heart of the proud Roman Republic and later a center of empire, was built on a drained swamp area between the Capitoline and Palatine Hills. Sacred to Roman eyes, it served as a marketplace, law center, place of oratory, government and worship, contained the ancient Umbilicus Romae (a brick navel marking the ideal center of the city) and the reputed tomb of Romulus...
...Canada's barren backlots is a small area where the compass needle, properly suspended, points directly downward. This phenomenon does not usually terrify observers: they know that they are standing on the north magnetic pole, the umbilicus of the earth's magnetic field. When the magnetic pole changes its location, as it does, the needles of all the world's compasses shift a little...
...Baltimore Polytechnic. The Polytechnic taught him 1) that philanthropy was "a purely imaginary quantity, like demi-virginity or one glass of beer," and 2) that the eager curiosity of growing boys was not to be satisfied by anatomy classes in which "all the abdomen south of the umbilicus was represented by a smooth and quite uneventful surface...