Head and arms
Three arteries leave the top of the arch. The first, the brachiocephalic trunk, divides behind the joint of the breastbone and the right collarbone into the right common carotid, for the head, and the right subclavian, for the arm. The left common carotid and the left subclavian leave the arch on their own.
The arch of the aorta and its branches, Gray's Anatomy, 1918, figure 505Wikimedia Commons, Henry Vandyke Carter, Public domain (Gray505.png)
Each common carotid climbs the neck beside the windpipe, where its pulse can be felt. At the level of the upper edge of the thyroid cartilage it divides into the internal carotid, for the brain, and the external carotid, for the face, scalp and neck.
Each subclavian arches over the first rib behind the collarbone. On the way it gives off a vertebral artery, which climbs through holes in the neck vertebrae to the brain.
The arteries of the right side of the neck: the common carotid dividing into the internal and external carotids, and the vertebral artery climbing through the neck vertebrae, Gray's Anatomy, 1918, figure 513Wikimedia Commons, Henry Vandyke Carter, Public domain (Gray513.png)
Sources
- Susan Standring (ed.), Gray's Anatomy, 42nd ed. (2020), chapters on the great vessels and the neck.
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