A Queensland obstetrician’s tirade about naming female body parts after “dead white dudes” has snowballed into a campaign to phase out 700 eponymous anatomical terms.

Dr Kirsten Small got the ball rolling when she posted a “little rant” on Twitter claiming there were alternatives to the men’s names for women’s anatomy, such as uterine tube for the Fallopian tube.

“We have a personal choice to decolonise our language. Make use of it,” wrote Dr Small, a lecturer at Griffith University’s School of Nursing and Midwifery, Gold Coast.

Dr Small thought no more about it until she was tagged in a tweet by Dr Mike Cadogan, an emergency doctor from Perth, to alert her to a review of eponymous terms he and two other emergency doctors had completed in response to her post.