Diary of a First-Year Vet Student: Studying Old School

There's no getting around the fact that gross anatomy is an old-school topic that all vet students must slog through. There are so many ways this course could be made more interesting. A start might be to focus more on clinical applications and less on fiddly bits. But for some odd administrative reasons that are far beyond the scope of this blog, the newly hired instructor is not being allowed to even use his own material. He has to use slides and content created by the instructor whom he replaced. That has to be frustrating for him too.

So I've resorted to one of the most old-school study aids there is to get through this old-school content: flash cards. Except that anatomy isn't a game of just terms and definitions, although we have to learn thousands of new terms each quarter (over 700 in just the first half of this quarter alone!). You also need pictures.

Here are a couple of my creations, the first for general anatomy of the pharynx, and the second for the major salivary glands and lymph nodes of the head.

Most of us also use mnemonics to help us memorize groups of things, such as the names and general functions of the twelve cranial nerves. Each informal study group tends to come up with their own mnemonics but for the cranial nerves, two in particular raced like wildfire through the entire class.

Oh Oh Oh, To Touch And Feel Very Good Velvet After Hours. That tells me the names of the cranial nerves: olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, vestibulocochlear, glossopharyngeal, vagus, accessory, hypoglossal.

Some Say Money Matters But My Brother Says Big Boobs Matter More. That tells me the general functions of these nerves: S for sensory, M for motor, and B for both. Sure, you need to memorize additional details but you'll never get started with that until you have the big picture in your head. Oh, and the boobs thing? If you have time to worry about that while in vet school, you probably aren't studying enough. But if it really bothers you, change it to books. Most of us thought boobs was funnier.

I've come up with some of my own. Most of the muscles of the hyoid apparatus? Many Good Things Satisfy Sheep: myohyoideus, geniohyoideus, thryohyoideus, sternothyroideus, and sternohyoideus. Notice how neatly SaTisfy tells me the name of sternythyroideus, different from the others. I worked pretty hard on that one. How about muscles of the laryngopharynx? Please Paint His Tin Can Silver: pterygopharyngeus, palatopharyngeus, hyopharyngeus, thyropharyngeus, cricopharyngeus, and stylopharyngeus. The H, T, and C muscles contract in that order when you swallow to push food into your esophagus. For all of the muscles, all of them, we also have to learn the origin, insertion, innervation, and action. That means the fiddly bone bits the muscles attach to and what nerves tell them what to do.

I wasn't kidding: over 700 new terms just in these first four weeks, plus all their associated details. And that is just one class. I've got four classes this term just like this one.