Anatomy · Nerves
The nerves of the body
A clear, referenced guide to the body's major nerves — what each one is, where it runs, what it controls and the problems that affect it, across 11 key nerves.
Arm
Central
Head & neck
Leg
Trunk
No match — try another nerve name.
See also
Bones · Organs · Muscles · Blood vessels · Body systems
How to use this section
Structure, function, and what goes wrong
Each guide covers the nerve’s course, what it supplies for movement and sensation, where it is vulnerable to compression or injury, and the recognisable pattern produced when it is damaged.
Nerve anatomy is unusually rewarding to learn because it is predictive: a nerve supplies a defined territory, so the pattern of numbness or weakness points to where along its course the problem lies. Compression at predictable narrow points produces the familiar syndromes — the median nerve at the wrist in carpal tunnel syndrome, for instance. The vocabulary used to describe these patterns, such as paraesthesia and neuropathy, is defined in our glossary.
Anatomical descriptions rely on a small set of position words used precisely: proximal and distal, medial and lateral, anterior and posterior. They are always relative to the standard anatomical position, not to how a body happens to be lying. All are defined in our glossary, and appear as clickable definitions throughout these pages.
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