# What is the tendons, aponeuroses, and fasciæ?

Gray’s Anatomy (1918) describes the tendons, aponeuroses, and fasciæ as follows: Tendons are white, glistening, fibrous cords, varying in length and thickness, sometimes round, sometimes flattened, and devoid of elasticity.

## What it means

- Tendons are white, glistening, fibrous cords, varying in length and thickness, sometimes round, sometimes flattened, and devoid of elasticity. They consist almost entirely of white fibrous tissue, the fibrils of which have an undulating course parallel with each other and are firmly united together. When boiled in water tendon is almost completely converted into gelatin, the white fibers being composed of the albuminoid collagen, which is often regarded as the anhydride of gelatin.
- They are very sparingly supplied with bloodvessels, the smaller tendons presenting in their interior no trace of them. Nerves supplying tendons have special modifications of their terminal fibers, named organs of Golgi. Aponeuroses are flattened or ribbon-shaped tendons, of a pearly white color, iridescent, glistening, and similar in structure to the tendons. They are only sparingly supplied with bloodvessels.
- The tendons and aponeuroses are connected, on the one hand, with the muscles, and, on the other hand, with the movable structures, as the bones, cartilages ligaments, and fibrous membranes (for instance, the sclera). Where the muscular fibers are in a direct line with those of the tendon or aponeurosis, the two are directly continuous.
- But where the muscular fibers join the tendon or aponeurosis at an oblique angle, they end, according to Kölliker, in rounded extremities which are received into corresponding depressions on the surface of the latter, the connective tissue between the muscular fibers being continuous with that of the tendon. The latter mode of attachment occurs in all the penniform and bipenniform muscles, and in those muscles the tendons of which commence in a membranous form, as the Gastrocnemius and Soleus.

## Sources

- [Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body (1918)](https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/anatomy-of-the-human-body/3-tendons-aponeuroses-and-fasci/)

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