Thyroid, from the Anatomy portfolio by Jean-Michel Basquiat is the only print in the series that draws a full head in profile — a skull seen from the side, teeth visible at the jaw, the neck extending downward with five structures labelled in sequence: HYOID BONE, PONUM ADAMI, CRICOID CARTILAGE, THYROID, TRACHEA. The head is not the subject. The throat is.

The structures labelled down the neck are all involved in voice — the hyoid bone anchors the tongue, the Adam's apple marks the larynx, the cricoid cartilage forms the base of the voice box, the thyroid sits around it, the trachea carries air to and from the lungs. Basquiat drew the anatomy of speech, labelled it in sequence, and placed it in the only print in the portfolio that shows a recognisable face rather than an isolated bone. The head exists to provide a location for the throat.

PONUM ADAMI is a phonetic spelling of pomum Adami — Adam's apple, the protrusion of the thyroid cartilage that is more prominent in men, named in the Western anatomical tradition after the biblical account of the forbidden fruit catching in Adam's throat. That Basquiat chose this particular anatomical term, with its embedded mythology about the origin of speech and transgression, and rendered it phonetically rather than correctly, is consistent with how he treated language throughout his career — absorbing the official terminology, wearing it loosely, and leaving the trace of his own voice in the gap between what the convention requires and what his hand actually did. The Anatomy portfolio was produced in 1982 in an edition of 18, making Thyroid one of the rarest prints Jean-Michel Basquiat made during his lifetime.

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