All right, I wanted to talk really briefly about some of the major body cavities that we'll learn about this year. In this side profile view... What you can see is the cranial cavity, which encases the brain, and then the vertebral cavity, which will encase the spinal cord.
The two of these together are going to be covered with a layer of membranes called the meninges, which you'll learn about in a later chapter. A couple of other cavities. One major cavity here is the whole thoracic cavity, which I drew it here.
I didn't highlight it here, but basically this whole region here. Here's the thoracic cavity. And then you have the abdominal pelvic cavity, which includes majority of that is the abdominal cavity.
And then you have the pelvic cavity. So abdominal, pelvic cavity. The textbook diagrams are neater. This is just to give you and allow you to think about it and look at it.
Definitely look over the actual diagrams from the book for clearer images. Within the thoracic cavity, which again is this whole... region around here is the thoracic cavity. What you have is the heart and the lungs and a few other things, but mainly the heart and lungs.
So the lungs are called the pleural cavity. And so the lungs will include, the pleural cavity includes the two lungs. Then you have the pericardial cavity, which is the cavity that encases the heart. You'll learn about the layers when you learn about directional term.
you know there's the visceral and parietal layers. So there's the visceral pleura and the parietal pleura which are the layers of the lungs. Visceral pericardium, parietal pericardium which is the layers of the heart and it's called the peritoneum here. You'll learn more about that when we get to those sections but basically visceral and parietal for all of those.
If you've heard of them the term mediastinum. mediastinum is right around here. It's basically the space in between the lungs. So it includes the heart, but what's not shown in here is you have two major tubes that are coming from your head into your lower body.
That would be part of that mediastinum. One would be the esophagus, where you swallow your food, and the other one's the trachea, where you're breathing in the air. So the mediastinum is basically that whole section in the middle of your chest. which is in between the lungs, which includes your heart, your trachea, your esophagus.